


The Lethal Side of Man

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, (though technically this didn't NOT happen), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon Era, Caretaking, Could use more recovery tbh, Episode: s01e01 Currahee, Eventual Happy Ending, Fever, Gaslighting, Hallucinations, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Lewis Nixon Is Kind of a Badass, M/M, Mad Science, Medical Torture, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Graphic Smut, Suicidal Ideation, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 22:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16417016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: The day after earning his jump wings, Dick is reassigned to a mysterious project at a tiny fort in Tennessee. When he arrives, he finds that the work being done there is more sinister than he could have imagined, and that there can be no escape.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings:** This fic pretty much does what it says on the tags. Although, it more or less ends... well (I guess), there is a lot of abuse of authority, torture, trauma, fish monsters, and medical ick (technical term) happening. Aside from non-consensual nudity, there are no sexual elements between Dick and the antagonists. Please don't read if you find that kind of thing upsetting. If you just want the comfort part, skip to chapter five.
> 
> Written for Spook_Me, based on the prompt [Inside the Lab by karmenta.](https://www.deviantart.com/karmenta/art/Inside-the-Lab-188041728)
> 
> Big thank you to actonbell for all the hand holding and encouragement. We're sisters in Dick Winters whump fandom for all time!
> 
> Both of the novels mentioned in the story are real novels from the era, though I can't say I especially recommend reading them due to large amounts of racism. The movie version of one does star a very young Gregory Peck though, so there is that.

_Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay._

— _The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde_ by Robert Louis Stevenson.

* * *

Sobel hauled Dick into his office the morning after Easy Company earned their jumpwings. Dick had been expecting it. Sobel had hated that Dick had won Colonel Sink's Paratrooper Olympics and therefore the right to be jump master on the first flight and win his wings first. Though Sobel could be a man who ate his revenge cold, he wasn't usually, and this was the first chance he had to take the implied slight out of Dick's hide. 

From the smile on Sobel's face when Dick walked in, Dick fully expected a week on mess duty, or some other similar reward for his performance.

"Sir?" Dick asked, and braced for the worst.

"Lieutenant Winters," Sobel said. He glanced down at the papers in front of him, which Dick thought was his own personnel file. "You're presence has been requested for a special assignment."

So it was kitchen patrol again. Dick suppressed a sigh and said, "Yes, sir."

Sobel didn't look at him, just kept his eyes on the papers in front of him. "You're to report to Fort Forrest by 1400 tomorrow. Take your footlocker. I expect it will be a long assignment. I have your orders and travel documents here."

"I..." Dick blinked, not taking the proffered envelope. He had never in the world expected that Sobel would be able to get Dick transferred out of the 506th entirely. The shock of it rocked him back on his heels and it took him a moment to gather his wits enough to ask, "May I ask what the assignment is, sir?"

"That information will be disclosed to you on arrival," Sobel answered. He was trying for cool professionalism, but couldn't quite suppress a smug smile. Dick had never wanted to hit a man more. "The transfer has been approved by Major Strayer and Colonel Sink, and you can be assured that it is a high-priority posting."

Meaning that Dick had next to no chance of appealing the decision on any grounds. Whatever the position was, if it was in higher demand than the parachute infantry, it had to be pretty special. If the commander of the regiment had already approved, there'd be no pleading to higher authority, either. Dick saluted and took the envelope. He had no other choice.

Nix was stuck on inventory—his reward for following Dick out that door on the first C-47—and Dick snagged him aside into a storage shed. Nix looked hopeful until he saw Dick's expression and the envelope in his hand. Instead of trying to explain, Dick just handed him the orders. He'd read them on the way over, and they were short and to the point. Nothing more than Sobel had said already.

"This is bullshit," Nix exploded. "Where the fuck is Fort Forrest?"

"Tennessee, I guess." Dick felt numb. The night before, they'd been celebrating finally officially becoming paratroopers. They'd been about to forge that concept into victory, Sink had said. Dick guessed the 506th still would, just without him. He would lose his men. What was second platoon going to do without him to protect them from Sobel? Dick braced himself against the wall and struggled not to vomit.

"Hey," Lew said, he held Dick's face between his hands, warming him. Dick hadn't realised his skin had gone so cold. "Hey, Dick, look at me. There you go. It's..." Even Lew couldn't say that this was going to be alright, so instead he leaned in and kissed Dick lightly on the lips. It wasn't sexual but meant entirely to remind Dick that Lew was there, and cared for him, even when no one else in the army did. "Look," Lew said. "I'll figure out what this assignment is and get transferred there too. Okay?"

"Lewis, you can't," Dick told him, though his heart ached at the idea of losing Lew on top of everything else. "You have to stay here, look after Easy for me. They can't lose both of us, not now."

Nix stepped back. There wasn't a hell of a lot of room between the crates of extra boots and rows of cleaning supplies, but it got enough space between them that they weren't breathing each other's air. "Dick," Nix said, "I'm not you. I'm not... I'm not going to tolerate that son of a bitch for anyone's sake but yours."

"It would _be_ for my sake," Dick told him, hoping that would be enough. He didn't have anything else to offer. "I'd sure feel a lot better knowing you were still here. I'll write when I get there, see how you're doing."

"We'll see," Lew said. He folded his arms and scowled at Dick, but that was what he'd done when Dick had been trying to talk him into joining the airborne in the first place. Nix had folded eventually then, too.

"Thanks, Lew," Dick said. He stepped forward and pulled Nix into a tight hug. Nix's head dropped to his shoulder, and Dick buried his nose in Nix's hair.

This would probably be the last time they saw each other. They'd only known each other for six months—and had been falling into bed together for half that—but already it seemed impossible for Dick to imagine the rest of the war without Nix at his side. What was Dick going to do without him?

If Dick didn't pull away now, he was never going to. He let go and pressed a fierce kiss to Nix's forehead before stepping back. Then he saluted and said, "See you around, Nix."

Dick turned his back before he did something really stupid like tell Nix he loved him or that Dick wanted him to try and transfer after all. Or kiss him until neither of them could breathe.

It was better to make a clean break of it. Dick went to the barracks he shared with the other junior officers and packed up his footlocker as quickly as he could. The men were already out doing PT, and were easy to avoid. That was good. Dick didn't want to talk to any of them. He felt a wave of grief rising in him as he slammed the lid of the footlocker shut, and tried to hide it behind his growing fury at Sobel. He couldn't have just been randomly plucked for this new assignment, no matter what it was. Sobel must have put him up for it, and now it was too late for Dick to do anything about it.

Dick remembered how he'd originally planned to serve out his year and then never think about the army again. That had been before Croft and Benning, let alone before he'd decided to join the Airborne. His country hadn't been at war then, and a year of voluntary service had seemed like the best way out of getting drafted. Dick been a boy then, it seemed, one who hadn't really understood what duty and courage were. Dick hadn't understood then that when he was in the army, he wouldn't just be looking after himself, he'd be looking after all of his brother soldiers. Croft had taught him that, even before Dick had met Nix, and now they were at war.

Dick had gotten to know every man in his company over the past month, and now they were all going to go on together without him. Dick would have to start over again with a whole new group, quite likely one that had already bonded before he got there. He would be an outsider, and the concept depressed him. Dick didn't even want to think about how much he was going to miss Nix.

He ran into Private Tipper on the way to the motorpool, and asked him to drive him into Toccoa. There would be a train in half an hour, and Dick might as well get the slog to Tennessee started as soon as he could. 

"Sir?" Tipper asked as he helped Dick unload his footlocker at the platform.

"Yes, Private?"

"May I ask if you're leaving for good, sir?"

Dick stared down the tracks, willing the connection to Atlanta to come early. He couldn't avoid answering though. He should have thought before of what the men would think of his transfer. It would affect them as much as it would him, especially if Sobel said Dick had wanted to abandon them. "I don't know, Private," he said. "I received new orders an hour ago. I wasn't expecting them, and didn't apply for them."

"Sorry to see you go, sir," Tipper said. 

"I'm sorry to leave Easy," Dick answered, and felt a knot in his throat. He couldn't think about it. "Pass the word around, would you?"

"Will do, sir." Tipper should have hurried back before Sobel missed his runner, but he lingered on the platform, looking for a train that wasn't due for twenty minutes.

"Private," Dick said softly, and Tipper nodded.

He turned to Dick and saluted crisply.

Dick returned it, and focussed on the grey sky behind Tipper's ear and feeling nothing at all. He turned back to the tracks as soon as the jeep pulled away, refusing to watch it round the corner of the coffin factory back up the road to Camp Toccoa. Dick didn't even want to look at Currahee again. How many times had he run up it over the past six weeks?

That morning, Dick had been on the top of the world. He'd been the first in the regiment to earn his jumpwings; he'd had a CO he hated but a company he loved, and he'd had a guy he was crazy about and who seemed to like him too. In the space of an hour all of that was gone, and Dick had no idea what his future held.

As the train pulled in, Dick tried to think if he'd even heard of Fort Forrest, Tennessee. The name didn't sound familiar, and he couldn't say where Jacksonville, Tennessee, was, though the train routing on his travel papers went down to Atlanta and then up through Chattanooga to a small branch line. Dick assumed it was in the east. Not that far, really, probably not much more than a hundred miles in a straight line, if one had wings and could go over the Appalachians.

It felt like it might as well be on another world. What would he be doing there? What was so important to the army to pull a fit and qualified paratrooper out of training in the Airbourne? The United States was fighting a war on two fronts, and Dick had spent the last year hearing they couldn't spare a man for anything.

He heard the train coming before he saw it, but it smoked into view soon enough. Dick was the only person to board at Toccoa, and got military seating. He would be in Atlanta in a few hours and hopefully Fort Forrest by that evening. Whatever this new assignment entailed, Dick would find out about it soon enough.

* * *

Between delays on the lines, some local confusion about the name and location of Fort Forrest, Dick didn't step off onto the cement block that marked the Jacksonville stop until well after midnight. A heavy drizzle had set in by then, and Dick pulled his jacket around him and peered through the dark. He hadn't seen any lights for the last ten miles or so, and it didn't seem like the electrification of Tennessee had hit this area yet, despite the power poles that lined the track.

Dick wondered for the hundredth time what kind of posting could await him. Was it some kind of special wilderness survival course? Or perhaps some kind of sabotage or counter intelligence work. He'd shown neither aptitude nor interest in anything of the kind, but maybe his high scores at Toccoa had earned him someone's attention. He still hated being dragged away from his men, and missed Nix terribly, but perhaps some good could come out of this. The army must have some work for a half-trained paratrooper who'd just earned his wings.

A jeep honked behind him, and Dick turned and looked for lights. There were none. A corporal materialised out of the drizzle and saluted, asking if Dick was Lieutenant Winters, as though there might be another officer lost somewhere on the fog.

"That's me," Dick said, trying to make out a unit patch or any other distinction. He didn't see any, and the corporal himself was as blandly middle-American in appearance as could be imagined: open square face, dun-coloured hair, wide-set light eyes. He didn't say his name.

Dick reached down for one end of his footlocker, but the corporal cheerfully shouldered it and carried it across the tracks. The jeep was running with lights extinguished. Even when Dick got into the back and the corporal pulled away from the platform, no light was lit. They drove in complete darkness up a twisting gravel road into the hills, the corporal seeming to know the turns by heart, or have preternatural vision. Dick wanted to ask where they were going, or what work they did, or if the young man liked his posting, but kept his peace.

It was about an hour from the station to the high gates an army compound. The fence was chain-link steel with double coils of barbed wire lining the top a dozen feet above the ground. It was a lot of metal in these days of scrapyard scavenging and fleet building, even on a military post. No sign identified it as Fort Forrest, but large warnings indicated that it was U.S. Army property and that trespassers would be shot. A pair of MP's at the gatepost checked both the corporal and Dick's A.G.O. cards, as well as Dick's orders and travel papers, shining their flashlights into Dick's face as they did.

The drizzle had turned to rain, but the corporal didn't put the top up, just drove another five minutes through freshly logged woodlands and mud to a series of low-slung cement buildings. One had "Office" written on the door in stencilled block letters, though it didn't say whose office.

"There you go, sir," the corporal said, pulling to a stop in front of it. "The major's expecting you. I'll take your locker to your billet, sir." He pulled away the second Dick's boots hit the ground.

Dick wondered if he should still be wearing jump boots, now that he wasn't in the airborne any more. He'd just bloused his trousers a little over twenty-four hours before. However, he certainly didn't want to wear shoes in this muck. His boots sank to the ankles within two steps.

"Enter!" a bright voice called before Dick raised his hand to knock. 

He did, and was almost blinded by the desk lamp as he opened the door. Dick stepped in and saluted, still blinking, and reported his name and rank.

The man behind the desk stood and returned the salute. He was wearing a service uniform, but his jacket was slung over his chair, and Dick couldn't see his rank or unit badges. He stepped around his desk and held out his hand to shake, "Major Alan Carswell," he said, and Dick picked out a twinge of Maine in his accent, "C.O., head of research, and probably chief cook and bottle washer around here."

He had a firm grip, but didn't try to crush Dick's hand. "It's a small post, then, sir?" Dick asked. The question seemed safe enough.

Carswell answered openly, not seeming to think that was prying. "Handful of officers, mostly beaker types like me, some orderlies, MPs to keep us all in line, and the rest of the candidates. I'll show you the whole thing tomorrow, Winters. Hopefully the blasted rain lets up. It's quite pretty up here when the sun shines."

"Candidates, sir?" Dick asked. Was he a candidate? A candidate for what?

"Tomorrow," Carswell said. "I'll show you the whole affair. Come along now. Corporal Bourock will show you to your billet. Report back here at 0700."

"Yes, sir," Dick agreed.

Bourock turned out to be his driver, who led Dick around the side of the building he was in to long narrow structure. It had an awning sheltering numbered doors from the rain. Bourock pointed Dick to #7, and said "Just in there, sir."

"All right, thank you, Corporal," Dick said.

The door had a heavy bolt on it, but no one had given Dick the key and it didn't have a throw on either side. There were no windows. Inside, Dick had the place to himself as he hadn't since he'd been a first lieutenant instructing at Camp Croft. It even had its own sink and toilet, though no shower. Whatever this assignment was, it afforded a lot more living space than any training facility Dick had been to before.

Not knowing what else to do, Dick made the bed from linens folded on the end, then stripped down to his skivvies. He knelt for a moment to pray, asking God to look after Nix and his boys back at Toccoa, and for his family back in Pennsylvania. Then he climbed into bed, pulled the covers up to his chin and closed his eyes.

It was quiet. Dick could hear no sound from the road, and the base lay perfectly still. He half expected to hear a panther yowling in the woods, or maybe a wolf, but even the crickets were silent this late in the year.

Dick missed hearing Nix breathing in the bunk next to his, missed more knowing that they'd talk softly as they dressed and prepared for another day of Easy's junior officers against Captain Sobel. Carswell seemed all right, but then so had Major Strayer, and he let Sobel run wild. Dick wondered what the other officers were like. Carswell had said they were mostly beakers—scientists.

It seemed like an odd, remote sort of place for any kind of research, but Dick knew well enough that bases were built where the funding appeared, and where the funding appeared was usually a matter of politics.

Dick fell asleep wondering who the candidates were.

* * *

He woke by habit at half past six, his eyes feeling grainy from only a few hours of sleep. Dick hoped that the mess, wherever that was, had coffee and plenty of it, but before he was even more than half dressed, Private Bourock knocked on his door and appeared holding a tray by the edges.

"You have to eat all of this, sir," Bourock said. He set the tray down on the folding desk and backed out. He hadn't saluted.

There was at least a large mug of piping hot coffee. It also had three condensed bars that looked like oat squares gone wrong. Dick bit the edge of one, and it tasted vaguely of tuna. It would be his luck, he decided, if he were here to test the army's latest ideas of rations. Those were usually rolled out on the men en masse though, from what Dick had seen. He ate all three bars, though they left his stomach feeling leaden, and he wouldn't have wanted to run Currahee in the next hour. Then he finished dressing and picked his way through the mud back to Major Carswell's office.

Carswell looked as chipper as he had before, lean, beak-nosed face flushed with enthusiasm, and not presenting the least sign that he'd been up to past 0200 the night before. He had his jacket on, and Dick saw the caduceus badge of the medical corps.

Dick really had let himself in for some kind of dietary study, he decided glumly. "Good morning, sir," he said with as much cheer as he could muster. "You said something about a tour?"

"Yes of course, Winters," Carswell said, and led Dick out into the mud. At least the rain had lifted into a low overcast that hung in the trees and on the edges of the fence. Dick wondered if the sun would burn it off, or if Fort Forrest lived in the perpetual greyness of a Pennsylvania winter.

It was a short tour. Carswell showed Dick the barracks he'd already slept in, the admin building he'd already been in, showers, a garage for the jeeps, and three other cement blocks described as "project areas." There was a gravel pad for PT and an obstacle course, but the purpose of any of it didn't come up in conversation. Dick didn't see any other personnel save the MPs at the sole gate. Were they all in the buildings? He listened for sounds of activity, but didn't hear any.

"Sir," Dick asked when they'd come back around to the office, and Carswell had given him a stack of forms to fill out, all of it basic statistical data that he could have gotten off Dick's recruitment form, "May I ask the purpose of this project?"

"Well, to win the war, Winters," Carswell said, like it was a stupid question. Which Dick supposed it was.

"I meant more specifically," Dick said. He was filling in his grandmother's birthplace, maiden name, religion and race, and was having a hard time seeing the point of any of it, even by U.S. Army standards. "What are you researching here, sir?"

Carswell looked up from his own stack of paperwork, and studied Dick's expression, as if he suspected he had some sort of ulterior motive. "Lieutenant, I do not believe in biasing the candidates. I will say that your participation in this research is of premiere importance to the war effort, and I expect your full co-operation."

"Of course, sir," Dick said mildly. He started filling in his mother's family history, and kept his mouth shut for the rest of the paperwork.

When he was done, Carswell took a vial of blood from Dick's arm, then told him to change into his PT gear, and that a Captain Becker would meet him by the obstacle course.

Becker reminded Dick a little of Guarnere in his broad shoulders and dark handsomeness, though maybe the ingrained scowl helped with the association too.

"Airborne, huh?" he said, immediately raising Dick's hackles.

"Yes, sir," Dick answered without inflection. He made himself not rub his arms against the cold, though if they stood still for very long, he'd start to shiver. Forrest was turning out to be a lot colder than Toccoa, despite being just the other side of the Appalachians.

"Never saw what the fuss was about," Becker muttered. He jerked his chin at the course. "All right, let's see how fast you can run that there and back."

Dick shrugged and took off. He hadn't had time to warm up, and got off to a slow start, but it was easier than the hellish course Sink had set up for his Olympics. By the time he got to the eight foot wall, his muscles had stretched out, and he was enjoying himself. Dick had always found a good deal of satisfaction in his body and his physical strength which he supposed was a little too much like pride.

On a grey day in the hills of Tennessee, a hundred miles from a soul he knew, Dick found it hard to begrudge himself the pleasure of a run. He ran the course all the way to the end, paused for a moment to scan the fence line—cemented to the ground without a gap as far as he could see—then returned to the start. Becker clicked his stop watch and made several notes before he looked up at Dick.

"That the best you can do?" he snapped.

"No, sir," Dick said. He was breathing faster and had worked up a sweat, but he stretched as he waited, and would be able to go faster this time.

Becker made a _carry on_ gesture and Dick ran the course again. He shaved three minutes off his time, which didn't get so much as a blink out of Becker, who just made him do the course again, and again.

By mid-afternoon, Dick's legs were trembling with fatigue, and he was regretting giving the course his best so early in. He was adding minutes to his time every run, and faced Becker with a clenched-jaw determination. Dick would not show any weakness in his airborne training, and he would not let Becker get to him. He'd survived six weeks of Sobel; he could survive this casual indifference and insistence on running Dick into the ground.

Becker actually did run Dick into the ground, quite literally. Around 1900, Dick hauled himself to the top of the wall, teetered on the top, then lost his hold in a blur of exhaustion and fell hard to the gravel. He twisted so that he didn't land on anything vital, but didn't manage to roll, and the fall knocked the wind out of him. He lay there staring at the darkening sky and gasping, until eventually Becker wandered over and nudged Dick's trembling leg with his toe.

"You alive, soldier?"

"Sir," Dick ground out. He should stand up, but his whole body was shaking, and he couldn't seem to get his legs to work. Now that he'd stopped moving, the late-afternoon chill was creeping into Dick's body and locking up his muscles. Even Sobel hadn't run them this hard without a break, and certainly not within hours of having met them.

Becker surprised Dick by reaching down and offering his hand. Dick took it, and let himself be pulled to his feet.

He swayed and leaned against the wall. "Thank you, sir."

"Now, back to the front of the course."

"Yes, sir." Was Dick going to have to keep running that damn course, in the dark this time? He didn't know how much more he had in him that day, and felt a bite of shame at his earlier overconfidence. Clearly Becker expected an officer who'd completed his airborne training to be in better physical condition.

He trudged back to start of the obstacle course, his PT gear equally soaked in mud and perspiration, expecting the worst. He felt light headed from hunger, and he didn't know if he could run just then without cramping up. He started shivering almost immediately, and didn't think he'd be able to stop again. The sun had set, and dark was quickly setting in.

Becker at least seemed to have warmed to him. He nodded when Dick approached, and made a note on his clipboard without frowning at him. "All right, Lieutenant," he said. "Ready for another round?"

"Yes, sir." Dick stood at ease, hoping the wide set of his legs would brace him upright and hide how much he was shaking. He really didn't know if he was going to be able to complete the course again, and felt anger rising in himself at his weakness. He should have trained harder at Toccoa. Being able to beat out the other paratroopers there clearly didn't mean a thing at Fort Forrest.

"What's thirty six divided by six?" Becker asked.

Dick laughed, then realised it was a serious question. "Six, sir."

Becker noted something down, which looked like it took longer to write than the number six or that Dick had got one right. It took Dick about four basic math questions later to realise that he was being judged on speed of response more than if he got the answer correct.

His brain felt distant, as if he were watching himself, standing in a field in the dark shivering and answering questions. They'd done this in OCS too to test acuity under stress, though that had been a softer version. Dick had never imagined that he would think of OCS as soft.

There was a pause, and Dick realised that Becker had stopped asking him questions. He waited, swaying slightly, to see what he would be asked to do next. Acid burned in his empty stomach, and Dick felt nausea rising. He tightened his mouth and stared into the distance, praying that he didn't throw up on Becker's shoes.

"Hold your breath, Lieutenant," Becker said.

Dick blinked, and trying to remember what he'd heard, and what that meant. "Sir?"

"Take a deep breath, and hold it for as long as you can."

Too tired to even wonder at that, Dick did as he was told, filling his chest deeply and holding in the lung full of air until his chest started to burn and his vision narrowed. He swayed on his feet again, and this time locked his knees to keep upright. He knew it was a mater of minutes, but the moments seemed to drag on forever, and the pain in his throat tore at him. Finally he let the breath out explosively and closed his eyes for a moment.

He felt as though he'd fallen off the wall again: breathless and not in control of his body. He needed to pull himself together. Whatever these odd tests were, Becker had to be doing them for a reason, even if that that reason was to see how well he could follow arbitrary commands.

"All right, run the course again," Becker said.

"Sir," Dick agreed, and set off as best he could. It was fully dark, and he was having trouble seeing the jumps. He scraped his shin and fell face first in the mud, and crawled forward. It was one hand in front of the other the whole time, until he got to the wall. He was floating outside of himself still, and the pain running through his limbs sang in his mind but didn't feel like a part of him. He didn't know how he got over the wall the first time, let alone back over it, his body just kept moving in the routines it had followed all day until he was standing in front of Becker again, panting and shaking. He wanted to ask not to be made to run it again, but knew that would be exactly the wrong thing to say.

"That's enough for tonight," Becker told him. He didn't smile, but his tone sounded softer to Dick. "Report to the office at 0700."

"Thank you, sir," Dick said automatically. He staggered to the showers and stepped into them dressed save for his jump boots—at least they hadn't taken those away from him yet.

At least, too, the showers had hot water and plenty of it. Dick soaked for as long as he could, scrubbing the day's mud off his skin at the same time as he let the water work heat through his muscles to his core. He'd stopped shaking by the time he got out, but felt stripped bare. His fatigue had moved to a point where his movements felt distant, and his steps seemed to float, even across the sucking mud as he slogged back to his billet.

There was another tray of ration bars on his desk when he got there, this time with a glass of water. They still tasted faintly of tuna and turned to sludge in his mouth. Dick had to force them down. The Army had finally invented something worse than K Rations, which Dick hadn't thought was possible.

Dick wrung out his shorts, shirt and skivvies and hung them over the chair. No one had explained laundry to him, and he hadn't seen any facility for it. He was probably meant to look after his own things, and he was too tired to do more than that tonight. He also hadn't seen who made the food, cleaned the offices, or maintained the jeeps. Maybe Bourock did everything. He hadn't seen Bourock since first thing that morning.

Dick prayed briefly, and slipped naked between the cool sheets. He should have been asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, but found that the day was haunting him. The room was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, and after months in constant company, Dick couldn't stop listening for the breath of other men.

He was too tired to think straight, but he felt different than any other indoctrination he'd been through. Basic and OCS had been harsh, but part of the process had been bonding with his fellow soldiers. Even Sobel's tyranny had had the effect of forming the men into a stone wall united against him. Here Dick was alone, and if the Army wasn't breaking down an individual to build a unit, then he didn't know why they were doing it. It felt too analytical to be pure cruelty.

Maybe they were simply testing his limits as a baseline for whatever research they were doing. Carswell had talked about candidates, perhaps they were screening him for a selection process. In either case, where were the other men? Dick had studied business in college, but he knew that a baseline should have a sample of more than one, and most positions tested multiple candidates. Carswell had mentioned others, even, so why hadn't Dick seen them?

He listened again, hoping to hear the creaking of bedsprings in the next room over, or someone coughing in their sleep, but silence filled the night.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, after his fish bars and coffee, Carswell escorted Dick to one of the project buildings. It was a windowless space of about twenty by forty feet with a locked door at the back, kitted out like a hospital and painted olive drab. Dick recognised an examination cot, and a blood pressure cuff, but not a lot of the free-standing machines. Maybe he should have been a doctor, like his mother had insisted. There was an orderly in medical scrubs with an single stripe, but no nurse.

"If you would strip, Winters," Carswell was saying. He had Becker's clipboard from yesterday and was looking over the notes more than paying attention to what Dick was doing. He still gave off a warmer impression than Becker had the day before, but Dick wasn't sure how to read either of them.

If going to an all-boys school and then being on his varsity wrestling team hadn't killed any qualms about male nudity Dick might have had, the army certainly would have. He shrugged and started undressing, suppressing the hairs rising on the back of his neck as he did. The orderly said nothing, just held out a cardboard box for Dick's service uniform.

"Underwear too, sir?" Dick asked.

"That's right." Carswell flipped to the last page and said, "You did well yesterday. Becker was impressed."

"I didn't get that impression from him, sir," Dick said. He didn't say that he'd thought Becker had treated him like something you would scrape off of your shoe. Looking down at his own body, he saw purpling bruises running up his legs and across his stomach. No wonder his body had ached when he'd woken up. Dick looked like he'd been beaten. The room was cold enough that goosebumps immediately spread across his skin, and Dick shivered.

"He passed you to the second phase of the assessment," Carswell said. He picked up a second clipboard. "That puts you within the top fifteen percent of men he's run over that course."

Dick supposed that was good to know, though he couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if he had failed. What if he hadn't put his all into running the day before, or had gotten more of the questions incorrect? Would Becker have sent him back to Toccoa, or if he'd washed out of this would he have washed out of the airborne as well? Dick didn't think he could stand being dumped into regular infantry after all the work he'd put in to excel with the 506th.

He didn't know if he could stand whatever this was either.

Carswell's tone was still friendly, but he directed the orderly to measure just about every part of Dick's body, from his weight to the length of his legs to circumference of his wrists.

The orderly—who Carswell addressed as John with no last name—didn't speak to Dick, but moved around him as though he were a cow or a machine part. Nothing he did hurt, but Dick couldn't help resenting the impersonal touches. Would it kill the man to crack a smile or make a wisecrack like the doctors who performed the usual Army physicals did? Those jokes were universally in poor taste, but at least then a man could tell that the doctors thought they were talking to him as a man and not as a bale of hay.

Dick wondered if he was just looking for excuses to hate this place because it wasn't the airborne and Nix wasn't here. The cement floor was cold under his bare feet, and he wished he had a mat to stand on.

When John was done his measurements, he photographed Dick from front and back, and then ran a series of x-rays of his entire body. After another blood sample, Dick was allowed to put on his underwear, socks and boots again, but not his uniform. John started attaching small metal plates to Dick's chest with surgical tape.

"Major Carswell," Dick said, he'd been trying to think of how phrase the question inoffensively for the last half hour. "I know you didn't want to bias your results, but could you tell me anything at all about this project?" He wanted to say that it would help to know that he was undergoing these humiliations for some understandable purpose, but knew that would show too much weakness.

Carswell looked up from his notes and set his clipboard down with a decisive click. John stepped away, giving Carswell space to step in front of Dick and look him up and down. For the first time, his expression matched the cool discourtesy of Becker's from the day before. "I was expecting this," Carswell said.

"Sir?" Dick asked. He'd been holding his arms out for John to access his ribs, but now slid into a position of attention out of habit.

"Your last CO attached a letter to your file when he forwarded it to us for consideration. He said you were in the best physical condition of anyone in his company, but that you constantly questioned his authority and were slow to follow orders. Captain Sobel told me that your behaviour frequently bordered on outright insubordination."

The unfairness of that assessment almost made Dick choke. He'd spent six weeks carefully and promptly following every instruction from a man he firmly believed was needlessly cruel and not terribly competent. Dick had thought he'd been able to keep that opinion off his face and out of his actions, but obviously that hadn't been the case. Of course, faced with an charge of insubordination, Dick could hardly protest that he did respect Sobel's authority, or even the army's. All he could say was, "I regret that my actions have given Captain Sobel that opinion of me, sir."

Even that made Carswell frown more deeply, and Dick knew he probably shouldn't have said anything at all. He'd come into this new post with a black mark already affixed, and he was going to have to keep his head down and prove Sobel wrong. Clearly, that meant no more questions. Dick nodded shortly, and Carswell backed away, letting John finish.

Each metal plate attached to a wire, and they all ran together into a boxy metal machine. Again Dick wondered at all the metal here.

"You will feel a slight warmth," Carswell said, "but tell me immediately if it becomes painful." He turned a dial, and the machine started to hum.

Dick did indeed feel a warmth through the metal plates, almost a humming, or the feeling of blood returning after he'd sat on his foot, but not as painful as pins and needles. He wanted to ask what the purpose of the machine was, but kept his peace, for the moment. Dick needed to think about what he would do next. Carswell and Becker had kept him on his back foot for two days, and Dick had to realise that if he was to be alone in this, he needed to stop assuming that what they did to him was in his best interests.

He gamely did push ups on the bare cement floor when asked, despite the tingling in his arms and chest, and then pull ups on a bar until his arms shook. The pain came from muscular exhaustion, not the machine, but the buzzing through his skin was still strange and unsettling. More so because Dick didn't understand what it was for. He had thought this was testing the effects of a new diet on muscle mass, or something of that kind, but if that were the case, he didn't understand what the machines were for.

Carswell turned the machine off for long enough for John to move the metal plates to Dick's legs and hips, and then reactivated it. Dick ran on a treadmill, keeping up a steady but not exhausting pace, and wondering all the time if there was anything he could ask that wouldn't get another accusation of back talking aimed at his head.

Though if it did, what was the worst that could happen to Dick? He could be charged with insubordination and ejected from whatever special program this was, into the stockade, but surely back into the infantry from there, and after not too long. Dick could be stripped of his commission and re-enlisted as to a corporal, or even a private. That would hurt like a branding iron, but at the end of it, Dick would be back in with fighting men. He wouldn't be stuck in this isolated hill post, with no idea what he was doing and no one to talk to.

The problem was that there was a chance that the work they were doing here—however odd it seamed to a boy from Pennsylvania with a business degree—was in fact vital to the war effort. What Dick was doing here could be improving or even saving the lives of other soldiers, and he was pretty damn arrogant to question his new CO. The army had pulled a man out of a special forces unit, and sent him to this backwater for a reason.

Dick only wished he had enough faith in the U.S. Army to assume it was a good reason.

Carswell kept making notes as Dick jogged on, but said very little. Dick's question had, it seemed, affronted his CO's jovial facade, and now Dick was left with working in disapproving silence as he had with Becker. That was fine; Dick had been a solitary young man all through college, and was able to keep company in his own thoughts quite easily, even if they had taken a dark turn lately.

He ran until his lungs burned and his muscles ached, and then he pushed aside the pain and ran longer. Dick's strength—and the reason he'd won Sink's contest—had always come out of his ability to keep going no matter what his body was telling him. He'd never been first to the top of Currahee, but he'd always been in the top ten, even after multiple ascents in the same day. Dick's mind ticked into a rhythm set by the thud of his feet on the treadmill and his own heart pounding in his ears. It made something like the baseline of a song, and his mind rolled through cadences to the beat, a one-man sing along of a kind.

It was only when, hours later, Dick had been forced to drop back into a walk, that Carswell increased the settings on the machine. Dick's muscles already burned with effort, and his breath came in harsh gasps, so for a moment he didn't realise what the tingling in his legs and shoulders meant. The pain increased, buzzing through Dick's muscles, and he realised that the sound the machine was making had taken on a higher pitch. The sound set his teeth on edge, and made his muscles tighten and release.

Dick's legs gave out, and he dropped to his hands and knees, sliding off the rubberised surface of the treadmill onto the floor. A cry caught in his throat, and he looked up at Carswell to tell him the plates hurt.

One look, and Dick knew that Carswell was very well aware of the pain he was causing, and that he didn't care. He was watching Dick with avid interest, eyes fixed and focused on Dick's face, clipboard slack in his hands.

Dick met his eyes and said through gritted teeth, "It hurts, sir."

"Of course," Carswell said, and Dick didn't know what that meant, but Carswell did turn the bloody machine off, and Dick was able to flop into a heap on his side.

The cold cement felt like a lake on an August day, and Dick let himself absorb the coolness for a moment before pushing himself back to his knees, and then to his feet. His muscles trembled but didn't betray him again.

Carswell's expression had slid back into a neutral mask, and he clapped Dick on the shoulder, hand smacking against sweaty skin. "You still want to know what we're doing, Winters?"

Dick didn't trust this sudden friendliness, but said, "I do, sir."

"After two weeks, you're going to be able to run that fast for twice as long, and not raise your heart rate past a hundred beats a minute." He was smiling again, but with pride, and as far as Dick could tell he was serious.

"Sir, Jesse Owens couldn't do that."

The corner of Carswell's mouth twitched down for a split second, then his smile returned. "And you don't think a man like you can do better than a boy like that?"

"Than four gold medals? Not really, sir."

"Well, we'll see. Why do you think I recruit from the regular army, not the USCT?"

No one had called the negro-only infantry regiments that since the end of the Civil War, but there was no way for Dick to comment on that. He stayed silent, considering. 

Dick could feel the pull of Carswell's promise. How much more could he do if he weren't so ground down and tired at the end of the day? He'd crawled into the barracks at the end of Sobel's night matches hardly able to take his boots off, then gotten up to lead PT on five hours of sleep. Jump week was the first time he'd gotten eight hours of sleep in six weeks.

Dick tried to imagine what would be possible if he had twice the energy, or three times. What would an officer who barely needed to sleep be able to achieve, especially if he had a company of men with the same abilities?

"You think you can do that, sir?" he asked.

"I already have," Carswell told him. "You are not the first candidate, Winters, or the only one."

It was a carrot. Dick knew it was a carrot, knew that Carswell had seen brewing mutiny and held this out in front of Dick despite what he'd said earlier about not wanting to bias his candidates. It was also a test, to see if Dick would push for more information, or meekly take what he was given. Dick thought about Sobel's letter, and how easy it would be for Carswell and Becker to brand Dick as troublesome and use more sticks than carrots. If Sobel had taught Dick nothing else, it was that there were a lot of things you could do to a man—or indeed make a man do—if you held absolute control of the thing he wanted.

"Sir, Have you ever failed?" Dick asked carefully.

"Certainly." Carswell admitted that too easily for Dick's liking. "On weak men, inferior men. We've had to let some candidates go, either after Becker's screening, or after tests like today." He clapped his hands briskly, and Dick suppressed a start. "Now that you've had a little break, I just have a few more tests for you."

"Yes, sir," Dick said, but his discomfort grew, even as John peeled the tape off his body and Dick was allowed to dress again.

* * *

That night as Dick showered, he studied the bruises covering his legs and stomach. After only a day to heal after the pounding he'd taken on the obstacle course, they should have been darkening to blue black, especially on his shins where he'd caught the treadmill that morning. Instead, they had started to fade and lighten to green and yellow. Dick rubbed at them, and they still hurt, but not as deeply as they should. The top layer of his skin flaked away at his touch, like he'd had a light sunburn.

The metal plates had left no mark that Dick could see, but his muscles had never quite stopped tingling, or he had the memory of the buzzing and finally burning sensation imprinted into them, like the memory of Carswell's expression was burned into Dick's mind's eye.

Dick scrubbed himself head to toe, using a squad's worth of water, and then dressed.

He caught Private Bourock coming out of Dick's billet, having just delivered his dinner tray. "Good evening," Dick said, as amiably as he could. It actually was a nice evening. The clouds had lifted, and the maples were catching the last sunlight in red and gold, their leaves just starting to turn yellow here and there.

"Sir," Bourock said stiffly. He wasn't quite standing at attention, but he looked like he'd be happier if he were.

"Thank you for bringing me dinner," Dick tried again. "You from around these parts?"

"No, sir. Nashville, sir."

"I've never been there," Dick said, "I'm from Pennsylvania, but our unit was scheduled for training in Fort Stugis. Maybe I'd have gotten to see West Tennessee then. Guess there's not much chance of that now that I'm here."

Bourock's mouth tightened, and he glanced at his boots. "Sir, I have other duties."

"Of course," Dick replied. "Carry on." He stood by his door and watched for a moment as Bourock fled back into one of the project buildings. Dick didn't catch more than a sliver of light as Bourock opened the door, and wondered if that was where the kitchens were.

Inside his billet, lay the usual tray of three meal bars and a glass of water. Dick sniffed the water, but it seemed normal enough. It was a bit hard—like most of the hill water running off the Appalachians was—but it didn't have any kind of chemical smell to it. Or taste either, when Dick sipped it. The meal bars still tasted like tuna. Dick considered flat out not eating them, but he was hungry and he had yet to decide what he wanted to do.

He missed Nix, not just for the obvious reasons, but because of the way he looked at problems. Nix had a way of looking at something that had been bothering Dick and neatly turn it upside down and inside out until it suddenly snapped into a new shape. His casual intelligence and failure to study anything would have rankled Dick—who woke and slept with field manuals—except that Dick loved him too much. If Nix were at Fort Forrest, he and Dick could figure out what was going on and what to do about it. Nix had studied chemistry at Yale and would be able to tell Dick what Carswell and Becker were doing to him, and if it made sense.

Dick was deeply and profoundly glad that Nix was safely back in Toccoa, dealing with nothing worse than Sobel's chickenshit browbeating and extra PT. Maybe he was spending his time with Matheson or Moore now. Dick should feel jealous of that, but it was just such a relief to know that there was a whole mountain range between Nix and whatever this place was.

Dick pushed the tray aside and slumped onto his bed. He didn't even have anything of Nix's as a keepsake. They'd never risked that kind of thing, and Dick had been in such a rush to pack and get out of camp that he hadn't thought to steal as much as a pair of socks out of Nix's footlocker. Dick should have thought ahead. He hadn't realised how lonely this place would be. He hadn't expected that he wouldn't have anyone talk to.

As much as Dick enjoyed his own company, he'd always fallen easily with his peers: the wrestling team at F&M, the other Pennsylvania boys in basic, Nix once he got to OCS. He'd connected with his men and united in the face of Sobel's tyranny. Here, he couldn't even get a private to talk to him for two minutes without the boy fleeing for the hills, and the officers were worse. Becker clearly didn't like Dick, and Carswell's quicksilver moods unsettled him. Dick wished he could know which part of Carswell was an act—the jovial major or the calculating scientist—or if either of them were.

Fatigue should be weighing Dick down, after that day of tests, stress and uncertainty. He stripped, said a quick prayer for Nix and for himself, and got into bed. Then he stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes, thoughts running the same circles they had all day. Dick was used to being able to sleep just about anywhere, but this place was defeating him. He could feel his heart beating fast and his skin tingling, like he was expecting a fight. 

Maybe it was food. The metal plates aside, they hadn't done anything to Dick yet, just tested him for what he assumed was a baseline. Were they drugging him with the tuna bars? Dick had seen a couple boys at F&M try to pull all nighters by taking one kind of upper or another. It always worked for a while, but after a couple days the crashes were always ugly to watch. If the sum total of the Fort Forrest research involved feeding the candidates amphetamines and watching what happened, Dick could expect to be a vomiting lethargic mess within a week. It couldn't be that simple, could it? Though Dick had seen the army get funding for more idotic ideas.

Maybe Dick had managed to wind himself up so tightly that he was making himself anxious, and imagining a fight where there wasn't one.

Dick decided that he needed to clear his head, and got up and dressed in his ODs. He would just circle the outside of the obstacle course and come back, see if there were any stars out. By then maybe he would have calmed down enough to settle.

The door to his billet was locked from the outside. Dick rattled the handle and sighed. He'd never been on a post where the trainees were literally locked down at night. There had been bed checks in basic, but the men could get out if they needed to go to the latrine or even just take a few minutes away from forty nine other groaning, snoring, scratching, covertly masturbating men sharing the barracks. Dick put his shoulder to the door and tested its soundness, but it was solid wood framed right into the cement structure. The bolt felt heavy and didn't jiggle, and the hinges were on the outside.

Peace of mind not in the least improved, Dick sat at the desk and fished pen and paper out of his footlocker. The boys at Camp Croft had given him the writing set the night before he'd left for Toccoa. Dick held the fountain pen, strangely comforted by his familiar weight, and considered what if anything might get through the various layers of censorship. He finally settled on.

> Lewis,  
>  I said I'd write and tell you how it's going, but it's taken me a couple days to get around to it. They're keeping me pretty busy here, but it's been interesting. I'm doing okay. I miss all the guys at Toccoa, and my C.O. here hasn't let me jump out of an airplane yet.
> 
> I guess this'll miss your birthday by a couple days, but many happy returns anyway. You're catching up to me! Hope the guys got you something nice. Hope also you're doing all right with training. I've sure been doing a lot of PT. Not sure you'd love it here. Like I said before, I'd stay put if I were you. Look after my boys, for me.
> 
> Say, I was out of Toccoa in such a darn rush that I forgot to pack any books, and there isn't much on post. Could you send me a couple if you get the chance? You know what I like. I'll ask my sister, too, so don't worry if you don't get a chance. Also, could you look in on my mother and let me know how she's doing? You know I've been worried about her health, but she doesn't always write, and I think she checks Ann's letters before she sends them, too. I guess Mom doesn't like to worry me. You know what the Winters family is like. You're likely glad to be shot of this red-headed pain in the neck, but I miss drinking with you.
> 
> See you around the war,  
>  Richard.

  
He set the pen down and reread the letter. Maybe it was too obvious. He considered burning it and starting over, or not sending anything at all. The problem was that Nix would probably be even more alarmed about not getting a letter when Dick had said he would write.

Dick hope that would be clear enough warning about Fort Forrest to make Nix to abandon his initial plan to try and transfer in. He wasn't sure why he'd put in the coded reference to having health problems. It wasn't like Nix could do anything about it, and it wasn't fair to worry him. Dick just wanted another soul on God's Earth to know that something was happening to him, even if Dick himself hadn't yet completely worked out what. If nothing else, writing to Nix made Dick feel a tiny bit less alone.

When the ink had dried, Dick folded the letter and addressed the envelope. With no PX, Dick would have to ask Carswell if it could go out with the administrative mail, and he didn't like his chances there. If he'd been able to connect with Bourock earlier, Dick might have risked trying to slip it out with a supply run to to town, but Dick would have to keep trying to make friends.

Dick felt his throat tighten in grief at how much he missed his friends. He'd had to make new ones on every assignment before, but there'd always been a chance. He'd never been all alone before. Lord, he was getting mopey, now. Time for bed again.

His heart rate had slowed while he was writing, and Dick thought he could sleep. When he got back into bed, he stared into the darkness for a long time.

* * *

The next morning, instead of eating the meal bars, Dick broke them into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. He did the same with the coffee. His stomach rumbled, and he knew he'd have a caffeine headache in an hour or so, but it wouldn't be any worse than Sobel's restricted ration marches. If Dick was being secretly drugged, he didn't want any part of it. He didn't want any part of any of this, but he dressed in his service uniform and reported to Carswell's office at 0700 on the dot.

Carswell opened the letter to Nix and read it in front of Dick. He took a long time about it, and Dick worried that he could see through the double meanings, but finally he stuffed it back in the envelope and tossed it onto the pile of outgoing mail. "If you want to borrow some books, I think Becker likes westerns."

"I'd appreciate that, sir," Dick said mildly. He was standing at ease wearing his best blank expression. He knew the mail was censored, but hadn't ever had a CO that blatant about it, especially not since Dick had gotten his commission. At least the letter would get out, though what would become of it after that, he didn't know. He was already feeling hungry, and a headache was starting to set in. That felt too fast, like Dick's body was a film that had been speeded up. "May I ask a question, sir?"

"You may ask," Carswell said, equivocation clear.

Dick didn't look at the letter, knowing that he was risking getting it out, unable to hold in his outrage at his treatment for a minute more. "Why are the doors to the barracks locked at night, sir?" 

"Security concerns," Carswell answered evenly. "We do very sensitive work here, Winters."

Did Carswell think Dick could be some kind of German spy? He'd been plucked straight out of the parachute infantry. Or was he worried that Dick himself was at risk from some outside force? Was Dick and whatever they were doing to him the sensitive work? It seemed likely. As did locking Dick in so he didn't try to jump the fence and make a run into the hills, a prospect he was beginning to consider. "Of course, sir," Dick said mildly.

"Now," Carswell said, with that dismissive clap of his hands. "Go get changed. Captain Becker is expecting you at the obstacle course."

This time, Dick paced himself. He didn't give his all to any one run of the course, but planned to be there all day. His completion time was longer from the start, and just kept getting longer as he went. After the fourth run through, Dick was doubled over, hands braced on his knees and gasping. He felt like he was recovering from the flu, not in the best shape of his life. The fall air was cold, but he Dick was dripping perspiration, and had to keep wiping his face on the shoulder of his shirt.

"What's the matter with you, Lieutenant?" Becker demanded, looming over Dick. He was tapping his clipboard on his palm like he was only just refraining from giving Dick a good thump upside the head.

Dick felt like he could use the smack. His skull felt like it was full of bees. "I don't know, sir," he said, voice slurred and stupid. "Must have some kind of bug. Sorry, sir."

Becker frowned. He couldn't argue that it was impossible Dick had picked up something at Toccoa or on the train.

Dick for his part was increasingly convinced that there had been something in the realm of cocaine in the food. He splashed water on his face from the outside tap, and drank out of his hands, trying to catch his breath.

"Come on," Becker grumbled. "The major will want to run your blood again."

"Will that be able to tell if I have the flu, sir?" Dick asked, not entirely factiously.

"Yeah, sure. Probably." Becker took the blood sample himself, giving Dick's arm enough of a jab to purple the whole inside of his elbow. He took saliva and urine samples while he was at it, then turfed Dick out with orders for him to shower and sleep until Becker sent for him. Dick felt genuinely lousy and didn't ask any questions, not that asking Becker would have gotten him anywhere.

He collapsed onto his bunk in his billet and stared at the ceiling for a while, but the darkness of the windowless room depressed him, and he decided he'd rather sit on the stoop for a bit. The door was locked again, of course. Dick hadn't heard the bolt thrown, and assumed it was either an automatic or an electric process. "Damn," he muttered, and kicked the wall beside the door. His boot made a satisfying thud, but the walls were cement like everything else. There'd be no way out through either.

A thump sounded on the wall, like a delayed echo. Dick held his breath, thinking he'd imagined it, but then he heard it again. Whoever was in the neighbouring billet had kicked the wall in reply. Dick had never seen anyone come and go from the barracks except himself, not even the fort's staff or the MPs, though presumably they slept somewhere.

Excited, Dick kicked the wall again twice. His ankle was already starting to hurt, and he cast about for something better. The sink was set into that same wall, and Dick assumed the pipes fed his neighbour's sink as well. He fished through his footlocker until he found his flashlight, and tapped it on the drainpipe of the sink three times. He pressed his palm to the pipe and waited. 

For a long time Dick didn't hear anything, and he almost went back to the wall and tried kicking it again. He had heard something then, he was sure he had, and it had been a response, but maybe whoever was on the other side didn't have a sink, or hadn't heard Dick's tapping on the pipe.

Finally, he heard a faint reply, like a distant hammer blow. It was three taps, like Dick had sent, more discernable as a vibration against his palm than as a sound, but distinct.

Dick rummaged through his memory for the Morse code they'd all had to learn in the airborne and tapped out, _NAME LT WINTERS_.

He wanted to get a scratch pad to write down the letters as they came back, but he didn't want to create any evidence of forbidden communication. It turned out he didn't need to. He felt three soft taps, three harder ones, three soft taps again: _SOS_. It repeated, then there was a pause.

Dick hesitated, unsure how to proceed. Regular soldiers weren't always taught Morse code, and didn't remember it if they were. Was there a better way to communicate? Maybe Dick could teach the man on the other side of the wall one letter at a time. He tapped out the simple soft and hard tap for _A_ and waited, praying that the other man understood what he wanted.

He felt three soft taps, three hard taps and three soft taps back: _SOS._ It repeated, harder this time, the beats blurring and coming closer together. It repeated a third time, then a fourth, degrading into nine frantic taps and then a pause. Did the man not know Morse code, or was this sigmal all he was still capable of sending?

Dick tapped out the signal for _Received_ and stood. He didn't know who was in the next room or why, but he did know that they were in distress and had begged for his help. _Save Our Souls_.

The door was still locked, and Dick put his shoulder to it and gave it a solid shove, but he didn't feel the least give. He tried giving it as hard a kick as he could manage right above the handle where the bolt was, but pain jarred up his leg, and he felt like he'd kicked cement. He dug through his footlocker, looking for anything that would help, but he had no weapons, and nothing with more heft than the flashlight. He looked at the pipes, but they were all cemented into the walls, which was one solid block with the ceiling and the floor. Dick was in a cage until they came for him.

When they came for him, they would have run his blood, and quite possibly realised that he was lying about having the flu.

Dick still felt ill, more so now that his body started to string taut with anxiety for the man in the adjacent cell. It really was a cell, and he felt stupid for not seeing that immediately. He hadn't expected this of the army, and apparently he should have. Dick paced in short circles—three steps to the wall, two across, two back, three to the door—but immediately started to feel dizzy and short of breath. He lay on the bed and folded his arms behind him, staring at the lightbulb. That too was built into a caged recess. How long until they took his footlocker so that Dick wouldn't be able to break his shaving mirror or flatten an edge in his tin of boot polish and cut his own throat?

 _Save our souls_ , he thought, and wondered what the man in the next cell could have endured to be reduced to frantic pleas for help. Would that be Dick in a week? In a month? Or was the man simply mad, one of the weak men Carswell had easily dismissed?

Dick both wished he knew the answers, and hoped that he never learned them.


	3. Chapter 3

He must have drifted off, because he woke to Bourock shaking his shoulder and saying, "Sir! Sir, they want you in the project buildings."

Dick felt as though buried in an immeasurable pile of down blankets, and had to struggle his way up from under them. Hunger gnawed at him, and but he didn't feel as shaky as he had earlier in the day. His watch told him he'd slept for three hours, though he'd neither taken his boots off nor crawled under the covers.

"Good," he said. "I want to see them too." He splashed water on his face and finger-combed his hair flat before striding out of the cell ahead of Bourock.

Instead of stomping through the mud to find Carswell and Becker, Dick turned sharply to the right and wrenched open the door of billet #6. He'd expected it to be locked, but it opened easily, and he stepped halfway inside before Bourock could say anything.

The small room was a perfect mirror of Dick's on, but it was also completely empty. The bed was stripped, with blankets folded on the foot, and no personal items or clothes gave the least sign that anyone had stayed there. Dick stepped all the way inside and crouched next to the sink. He could see no mark on the drain such as his the scuffs his flashlight had made.

Dick stood and looked around. He knew what he'd heard; his imagination could not have conjured up that frantic cry for help, no matter what drugs he was on. "What happened to the man who was in here?" he demanded.

Bourock was standing outside, watching Dick with the same mixture of tolerance and exasperation as a mother looked at a misbehaving toddler. He didn't try to dissemble or even to hurry Dick along, but remained silent, waiting for the inevitable surrender.

There was nothing left in the room to see, and no answers to be found, so Dick stomped out past Bourock and surveyed the post. He thought about just trying to make a break for it, before whatever happened to the man in room #6 happened to Dick. He couldn't see how it would work though. He still felt dizzy and nauseated, and the fences were too high to scramble over even when he was in his best condition. He assumed that trying to run past the MPs at the gate would earn him a bullet in the back, or worse. No, if he was going to try to flat out escape, he either should have done it already, or needed to wait for a better time.

He slogged through the mud back to the lab where Carswell had tested him and Becker had taken a blood sample. He hadn't seen inside the other two structures yet, and wondered what they concealed. Was that where the man from #6 had gone? Dick could just flat out ask, but he now suspected that insubordination wouldn't result in dismissal from the project, or even time in the stockade, but something else entirely. He hadn't worked out what that might look like, but his gut told him he didn't want to find out the hard way.

Both officers were standing on the far side of the examination cot. Becker had his arms folded and his usual scowl written across his face; Carswell's features were neutral, and Dick felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.

Dick saluted, and waited for the verdict. He thought he knew how to play this, but it would depend on Carswell's opening move.

Carswell seemed intent on letting Dick sweat it out and made a show of paging through his clipboard. Dick stayed where he was, knowing this game of old. Finally Carswell asked, "Do you want to revise you theory about having the flu, Winters?"

"Yes, sir," Dick answered promptly.

"To?"

"I deduced that my meals were drugged and stopped eating them, sir," Dick said. "I assume that I was correct, and I am now suffering withdrawal from the drugs."

The officers exchanged a glance, and then Becker shrugged as if conceding a point in an earlier debate. It was Carswell who kept questioning Dick, no annoyance in his voice, save clinical curiosity. "What do you plan to do now?"

"Sir, I would like to co-operate with the project," Dick said, hoping that his poker face held better here than any time he'd actually tried playing cards. "I liked how I felt before. I don't like how I feel today."

"Do we believe him, Major?" Becker asked, and this time it was Carswell who shrugged.

"Do we need to?" he asked.

"I suppose not, sir."

"Well then." Carswell came around the bench and right up to where Dick was standing at attention, looking him in the eye. His expression was still neutral, save for tiny crinkles around the corners of his eyes and a furrow between his eyebrows, but his knuckles were white from clutching the clipboard too tightly. "You will follow all orders without question. You will eat your meals in front of either myself of Captain Becker. If you fail to comply, or try to tamper with the tests again, you will not like the consequences. Do you understand, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir," Dick said evenly. "I understand, sir."

Carswell held his gaze for a minute more then stepped back. "Good. Now. Let's catch you up!" He reached behind him without looking, and Becker put a syringe in his hand. Without asking or even instructing Dick, Carswell, pushed Dick's jacket back, pulled his shirt and under shirt out of his pants, and injected the syringe into the soft flesh above Dick's hip. It didn't hurt, not even as much as a small pox vaccination, and Dick started straight ahead, even when Carswell smacked the skin sharply then stepped back.

"Waste of a day," Becker muttered, but Dick didn't think that was true. He personally had learned quite a bit.

Dick needed to get a weapon, he decided. Bourock and the officers didn't carry pistols, but perhaps Dick could get a scalpel, or make a blade out of the things in his foot locker. That wouldn't do much against the MPs with rifles at the gate.

"What do you want me to do now, sir?" Dick asked.

From the look on Becker's face, running the obstacle course naked over broken glass was in the cards, but Carswell said, "Eat. Go back to bed. We'll start over in the morning."

"Yes, sir," Dick said. He told himself that this wasn't any worse than Sobel, but sitting at a lab bench and eating the strange tuna meal bars while being glared at by his C.O. felt more humiliating than even being stuck on mess duty as part of a promotion. It felt like being a boy again, and one whose accountability was not trusted.

Dick ate as quickly as he could, and kept his peace all the way back to his cell. Before the door closed, he looked Bourock in the eye and said, "You are as accountable for what happens to me and the other men here as Carswell and Becker."

Bourock looked away and didn't answer.

When Dick tried tapping on the pipe under the sink again. He didn't hear any reply.

"Save our souls," he said aloud, and hoped God was listening.

* * *

The next day, Dick kept his head down, and did as he was told. He felt better. The drugs had kicked in overnight, and he was able to run again, though he didn't think he was faster than he'd been at Toccoa. Becker had him on the obstacle course most of the day. As he ran, Dick again looked for possible weaknesses in the fence line. He didn't see any. Unless he could find some wire cutters, it would have to be up and over, barbedwire included, or through the gate.

He tried to think of some kind of legal means of escape, bringing the Inspector General down on this place, but that relied on a means of communication that Carswell didn't control. Dick wasn't sure that even if he could get a message out, that it would do any good. He had been transferred here. The program clearly had military funding. What if the I.G.'s office knew what was going on, and just didn't care? What if everyone from the President on down decided that treating army officers like lab rats was an acceptable means to an end that might win the war?

Dick didn't know if he could survive losing that much faith. He was now almost certain that he also wouldn't survive what would happen if he stayed quiet and did as he was told.

He felt the same jitters and racing heart that night as he had the night before he'd quit taking the drugs. Dick didn't try to sleep, but spent the night making a blade out of his tin of shaving cream. He broke his shaving mirror, and carefully blunted one edge by rubbing it against the cement under the bed and then wrapping it in a strip of cloth. He sewed the tin into the hem of his OD jacket, and the glass into the seam of his service uniform's trousers.

By the time Bourock came to get Dick in the morning, he hadn't slept all night, and felt wide-eyed and ready. All he had to do was get close enough to the gates to get a jump on the MPs, and then he could disappear into the woods. Dick had spent months training how to disappear. He could make his way across country back to where Nix was, and they'd figure the rest out together.

Dick followed Bourock meekly, not even caring that Carswell watched him eat. Dick's thoughts felt like flashes of silver, trout in a stream, and his body was wound so tight that he knew that he would be able spring into action on a hair trigger. He would be like a bullet from a rifle. He really wanted a rifle. He glanced around, but didn't see any scalpels set out. Well, he had the glass with him, carefully wrapped and tucked away.

"How do you feel, Winters?" Carswell asked. Dick had finished his meal bars, and was drinking his coffee fast enough to burn his mouth, but he didn't care. That would heal, like the bruises had, and it didn't even hurt.

"I feel great, sir," Dick answered honestly. "Never better."

"You sleep at all?"

"No, sir."

Carswell made a note on his clipboard, but didn't say anything until Dick stood. John the orderly came in, and Dick figured he was in for another round of tests. He didn't want to do them, it had hurt last time, but it had also made him faster.

"Would you like to see more of the project, Winters?" Carswell asked, and didn't even wait for Dick to nod before he unlocked the door at the back of the lab. It revealed and narrow stairwell, almost a ladder, down to a lower level that Dick hadn't even guessed was there.

"How far down does this place go, sir?" Dick asked. He wanted Carswell lead the way, so Dick could push him down and make a break for it. There was some cover from the tree stumps approaching the gates, and he could get close without the MPs seeing him. But Carswell was standing away from the door and waiting for Dick to go first, and there was no way to get a sure hit in, not with John at Dick's back.

Dick bounced slightly, but didn't run. Instead, he let Carswell herd him down the stairs into the sublevel. He didn't know what he was expecting, Dr. Frankenstein's chamber of horrors maybe, like in the old movie, or something with a lot of chains, but it was just another lab. This one had different equipment that Dick didn't recognise, but was painted the same olive drab.

"What's down here?" Dick started to turn to look for Carswell, but John's hand came down on Dick's shoulder, and he felt the prick of a needle in his neck. Dick started to pull at the seam that hid the glass, but the blood rushed from his head, and he stumbled then fell.

* * *

Dick snapped awake, thoughts already racing. He was lying on his back, naked but covered in a sheet. He couldn't move his arms and legs, because he was strapped down at the ankles, biceps and wrists. His heart was pounding, and he could feel perspiration beading on his face. Whatever the drugs were, they'd given him too much of them. Dick couldn't keep still. He'd die if the didn't let him move.

"I hate when they get to this stage." That was Carswell. Dick turned his head, but the voice was somewhere in the lab behind him.

"All you care about is that it works," Becker grumbled.

Carswell didn't answer.

Dick took a deep breath and tried to organise his thoughts. Had they known he was going to run? He didn't see how they could have, but maybe it was just human nature, animal nature even, to try to bolt from an obvious trap. Perhaps it was just whatever _this stage_ of the experiment entailed. Whatever it was, Dick needed a new plan.

"You're awake," Carswell said, coming around in front of Dick. "Sooner than I expected, too."

"Major Carswell," Dick said evenly. "I demand to speak to your superior officer."

Carswell smiled, a little patronising twist of his lips, like Dick was a three year old girl who'd just said she wanted to be the President of the United States. "That won't be possible, Winters."

"I am a citizen of the United States of America, and a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army," Dick insisted. He wasn't sure why he was bothering. Nix would have laughed at him for thinking he could reason with these people. "I have the right to file a grievance up the chain of command. I have the right not to be experimented upon against my will."

Carswell wrote something on his clipboard, and then said in the mildest of tones, "I have noted your objection, and it will go in your project file for review by my superiors. I have found they're much more interested in results than in soldiers' rights."

Dick just bet they were. "This is what happens in a dictatorship," he snapped. "You're worse than Hitler."

"And yet we'll win," Carswell said, and Dick knew the conversation, what there'd been of it, was over. Carswell gestured, and John appeared in Dick's field of vision. John and Carswell pulled the sheet off Dick and folded it between them, movements measured and steady. There was no hurry in this. It wasn't like Dick was going anywhere.

Dick jerked at the restraints on his limbs, but they were heavy leather and riveted onto the metal table. Would begging help? He thought that Carswell and the others must be without pity to have done this to more than one man. Dick kept his mouth shut and held onto his pride, for the moment. Dick's resolve almost faltered when John began to tape the little metal plates to Dick's muscles. Dick closed his eyes, but not seeing what was happening made it worse, so he opened them again.

It took several minutes to distribute the plates down his arms and legs and across his torso, and during that time, no one said a word. Dick tried to think of something that could prepare him for this, but all thoughts of comfort slid away. He couldn't think at all, not with the precision he had in college: building one premise onto another. He couldn't even follow the thread of a single idea. All he felt was a growing animal terror, like a bull in a slaughterhouse.

Dick didn't understand how he could be a better soldier if he couldn't think. He tried to say that, but the panic rising in him closed his throat. His skin started to tingle. The machine was on. He closed his eyes again, and took a long slow breath. He hadn't been this afraid the first time he jumped out of a C-47. He hadn't been this afraid in his whole life. A part of him knew it was the drugs, but that didn't help the animal part of him from wanting to chew his way out.

The tingling intensified, vibrating through his flesh, through his bones. Dick clenched his jaw and told himself that no matter what, he wasn't going to scream. He wasn't. They wouldn't take that from him. Little tongues of flame seemed to lap over his skin, and he balled his hands into fists so tightly that his nails dug into his palms. Dick liked that pain. He knew it. He was causing it. The pain in his hands was his choice, not something being done to him. He could control this.

"I think it's safe to increase the levels," Becker said.

Dick didn't know how much time passed before he started to scream. All he knew was that the flames lapping his skin had burned through the tissues below until his heart caught fire. He was naked and alone, and his whole world hurt. He could do nothing but scream, not even stop himself. He screamed until his throat ached, and he thrashed against the bonds.

He understood, vaguely, that it was what he had to do to survive, that his body could do nothing else faced with that kind of pain, but that didn't strip the shame from it.

When the pain stopped, Dick slumped back against the table, gasping. His muscles jumped and twitched, and he couldn't seem to get his mouth to work. That was for the best. If he could talk, he would probably beg. Please, God, he didn't want to beg.

Dick blinked, and the lab swam around him. He couldn't get it to focus past a swirl of light and dark shapes. He closed his eyes again and tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry and his throat raw. He could feel the sweat covering his body cooling him as it dried, and he started to shiver.

Someone was touching him. The hands were gentle, and Dick wanted to lean into them, but that was wrong. They were the ones that had hurt him.

Carswell. Carswell had done this to Dick, and he hadn't even said why. It would be John touching him, taking the plates off. Dick could feel sharp bites of the tape pulling free. Then he felt the jab of a needle in his side again and another subcutaneous shot.

It was easier to think after that, though Dick still couldn't focus on more than one thought at a time. The shot kicked in, and Dick could see the lab again. John put a white cloth to Dick's lips, and Dick sucked the moisture out of it, and was ashamed that he almost thanked John. Without either of them speaking, John wiped the perspiration off Dick's skin with broad, efficient strokes. It felt brutally intimate, and Dick wished that he were allowed to just lie in his own stink.

When John was done, he threw the sheet back over Dick and left. Carswell and Becker seemed to have gone already, vanishing after they'd turned their machine off. Dick was glad. As much as he wanted to tell them what he thought of their sadistic parody of science, he didn't think he had any words in him.

"My name is..." he said aloud, and his voice was scratchy and low from screaming. He cleared his throat and said again, "My name is Richard Davis Winters. I'm a paratooper. I'm a lieutenant in the United States Army." Those words stopped him. Was he still an officer? Could you be an officer and a piece of meat strapped naked to a lab bench?

Why was he here? Why would they use an officer from a special unit for this kind of base cruelty? Carswell had said he wanted to make Dick into a better soldier, one that could run all day and not need sleep, but what did that have to do with the torture?

They were torturing Dick.

His mind caught on word _torture_ like it was barbedwire, and it ripped something open inside of him. Suddenly Dick wanted to cry at the unfairness and betrayal of it all, but he didn't. He couldn't find tears in him, only a wrenching, unspoken anguish.

That didn't matter anyway. The fact was that he had to get out.

Right now, that was impossible. Dick was strapped down, and if the bonds hadn't given when he was screaming and yanking against them, they weren't likely to now. They were all securely buckled in a way that his twisting fingers couldn't reach.

Dick would have to bide his time and hope that whatever the drugs were, they didn't dizzy his thinking like they had before. All his feelings felt too raw, and they were slowing down his thoughts. He would pretend to be weak and overwhelmed. He would pretend to be broken, and when Carswell and Becker let their guard down, Dick could cut their throats.

Even if they caught Dick after that, or the MPs shot him trying to get through the gate, it would be worth it. Ridding America of these two was Dick's patriotic duty.

He liked that thought; it eased his conscience.

"Only you would feel better about getting tortured because of duty."

Dick blinked and looked around. He'd heard Nix. Though of course Nix wasn't there. Thank God, Nix wasn't there. Even if he had been there, even as close as they were, Nix still wouldn't have been able to read Dick's thoughts.

"I'm hearing voices," Dick said aloud, and added it to the list of things he had to worry about. He wished he hadn't for a split second felt relief at the sound of Nix's voice. Dick needed to know he was facing this alone, not dragging his best friend into hell with him. But, God, he wanted to hear that rich, sardonic voice telling him off for being stupid enough to get caught in the first place. He wanted to feel a touch that was comforting instead of clinical or cruel.

Dick wanted to be back in Toccoa, and for all of this to be a horribly vivid nightmare brought on be Joe Domingo's latest attempt at spaghetti sauce.

The drugs still thrummed through his body, making Dick's heart pound too hard to let him sleep.

He couldn't kneel, but he didn't know any position that was closer to utter surrender and supplication than this. Dick prayed silently and fiercely that Nix would never see Fort Forrest, that Nix would forget about Dick and move on with his life and into the coming war. Dick prayed for the lives of all of the men in E Company especially in the year to come. He didn't pray for this to all be a dream—his mother had taught him more sense than that—but he did ask God, if it was in His will, to end these experiments, and for Dick to be the last man Carswell and Becker ever hurt. Dick closed his eyes against the glaring lights of the lab, took a deep breath, and prayed for God to lend him the strength he would need to survive what was to come with his soul intact. Finally he prayed for the soul of the man in #6, and asked God to have mercy on them all.

He then spent the next few hours picturing what would be going on in Toccoa without him, and trying not to think about what would become of him.

* * *

Carswell came in carrying a tray some hours later. Before Dick could decide what his play was, Carswell said, "Winters, I can untie one of your hands, and you can eat this like a man, or I can put a tube down your throat and feed it to you."

Dick licked his lips, and said, "I'll eat it." His voice still sounded raspy, but at least that fit with pretending to be weak. It wasn't as much of an act as he would like. Dick was starting to come down off of the terror and drugs, and felt wrung out. Every muscle ached, and he kept feeling echoes of the electricity flitting through his nerves.

Instead of undoing Dick's wrist right away, Carswell locked the bonds on his right wrist and both upper arms in place with small padlocks. Dick would never be able to unpick them left handed, and he didn't have his improvised knives. "Do you want some water?" Carswell asked.

"Yes," Dick said.

Carswell slid a hand behind Dick's head and lifted it, then held a tin cup to his lips. Dick drank what he could, knowing that the perversion of nursing was to show Dick how much power Carswell had over him, and that letting Dick eat with his hands was supposed to make him grateful. It didn't matter. He needed water, and he needed food. He would get out of this if he could stay strong.

_Save our souls,_ Dick thought, and wondered what had happened to the man in room #6. "What is this?" he asked. Carswell unbound his wrist, and Dick could eat by leaning up a bit and bending his arm from the elbow. The meal bars still tasted like tuna, and still didn't have any discernable texture.

"That's an interesting question." Carswell was watching him eat, and Dick had initially thought it was to make sure he didn't spit anything on the floor, but the intensity of focus went beyond that. "Ground rice and fish protein aside, it contains a substance extracted an organism we found in the arctic, deep under the ice. The truth is we don't know what it is, some sort of oceanic fungus, perhaps."

Dick made himself keep eating, but his stomach tightened and he felt bile rising. He would not throw up all over himself. It wasn't going to make a difference if he knew what this was; Carswell would still force feed it to him if he refused it. He had one bar left, and started chewing through it. "Well, why am I eating it?"

"We found the substance some years ago, and at first we didn't know what its properties were. It seemed to defy all research." Carswell was watching Dick for a reaction, and Dick wouldn't give him one. "And then it occurred to Becker to feed some of it to a rat, just to see what it would do." Carswell paused, giving Dick room to ask, or just time to finish the damn bar. It felt gooey in his mouth and heavy in his stomach, but he swallowed it down anyway. "The first rat died almost immediately." 

_Good to know_ , Dick thought, but kept his peace. He had no idea why Carswell was suddenly in a talkative mood, but Dick wasn't going to blow his first chance at finding out what they were doing to him.

"When we dissected the rat after," Carswell continued, "there had been changes, alterations to its physiology: muscle growth, thickening of its bones. It had happened too quickly for the creature to survive. We experimented with different doses, different conditions, different animals."

"And men," Dick said.

"And men," Carswell agreed. He shifted his lab stool closer to Dick's right side, but not nearly close enough to grab. "The result was a mammal that increases its strength by fifty percent and its endurance by three fold. It resists poison, needs next to no food, and can hold its breath for half an hour. With a man's intelligence, it makes the perfect soldier."

"But would it still be a man?" Dick asked. He didn't think whatever had been pleading for its soul in room #6 was much of one any more.

Carswell didn't say anything, which answered Dick's question just fine. He took away the paper plate and tugged at Dick's wrist. Dick didn't resist. There would be another chance, a better one; there had to be. Carswell took a blood sample, and Dick watched the slide of the needle into the skin and the dark red of his blood filling the vial. It looked normal to Dick, but who knew what was in it now. "After your next session, I'll let you up in a bit," Carswell said. "You can wash, if you like."

Dick closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. He could feel what he'd thought were drugs rushing through his blood already, as his stomach chewed up and digested the meal bars. He should try to throw up, he thought, but Carswell would just get John to force it down him. The idea of having a rubber hose jammed down into his stomach frightened him more than it should. His mother had told Dick about Alice Paul's hunger strike, when she'd been impressing the importance of voting upon him, and it had stuck.

That was a distraction. What Dick should be afraid of was this sea fungus or whatever it was working its way into his bloodstream and changing him. Changing him into what? Carswell had been unclear, just that Dick would be faster and stronger, and able to be nothing but a weapon. He remembered that line from _Coriolanus_ : "Make you a sword of me." That had not ended well for the man who'd spoken those words, and Dick didn't think it had for any of the earlier candidates either. Maybe the rats had done okay, but how could you tell if a lab rat had lost its mind?

Surely Dick would lose his mind, and if he didn't, what would he be?

"I'll still love you," Nix's voice said, and Dick knew it was an auditory hallucination. They'd never said that to each other. Besides, Nix wouldn't love a monster.

When would Dick's body start to change? He'd noticed the bruises healing before, and his skin peeling. Would his skin change—become plated and insect-like or scaled like a lizard—or would the monstrosity be hidden within him, like an apple rotten at the core?

Dick could feel his thoughts racing, and his body pitching up for a fight. He wanted to run. He could take that obstacle course in minutes he knew now, if they'd let him try. He wouldn't need wire cutters; he could fly over the fence.

If only Dick wasn't tied to the table. He yanked at the cuffs, but whatever strength he had gained, it wasn't enough to free him.


	4. Chapter 4

The next time John put the metal plates on, Dick didn't even try not to to scream.

When the machine turned off, and he lay a panting, ruined mess on the table, John detached the equipment and then uncuffed Dick. Before Dick could respond to his freedom, John manhandled him into a tiny cement cell, not three by three feet wide, and slammed the steel door. A second later, cold water began to spray from the ceiling. 

There was nowhere in the tiny cement cell to escape the frigid water, so Dick pulled his knees up to his chest and tried to put his back to the worst of it.T his was what Carswell meant by letting him wash, it seemed, or perhaps it wasn't. Becker had been supervising, not Carswell, and Dick appreciated the honesty in his cruelty.

Dick was shivering hard enough that his teeth chattered, and he couldn't tell if he was shaking from the after effects of the electricity or the cold water. He tipped his face back and felt the spray on his closed eyes and opened his mouth to drink. That at least was better than sucking at John's damp rag, or letting Carswell cradle his head like a mother. At least Dick was choosing to drink now, not being made to.

He had another choice, he realised: he could very likely beat his own brains out against the cement wall of the shower before they could stop him. If he had the resolve for it, that was. He didn't think he did, not yet, but he remembered how he'd left it too late to run, and they'd folded him into a trap, stripping all choices from him but this. How much further down the road could Dick go before even the option of suicide was taken from him?

"I thought it was your sworn duty to take them with you," Nix's voice said, and Dick nodded in reply.

He almost said that he wished Nix were really there, just to help him, but he couldn't go that far. Whatever happened, at least Nix was far away and safe. As safe as he could be as a paratrooper headed for a shooting war, anyway. Dick was glad that Nix and the men would be able to look after each other, and hoped they could find some protection from Sobel.

It occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, if Sobel had had the least idea what he was sending Dick into. Surely not. The man was petty and vindictive, but not evil. Dick found he almost missed Easy Company's commander and his peculiar brand of chickenshit. At least Sobel was trying to make better men of his troopers.

Although, Dick supposed, so was Carswell, only without giving the men a choice, even to wash out. Dick fervently wished for the comfort of a W Company that wasn't six feet long and six feet deep.

There was a work song about that, but Dick couldn't remember more than the edge of it. He hummed a snatch of the tune, his teeth chattering out of time, and rocked back and forth until someone turned the water off.

He was too cold to resist being strapped down again after that. John towelled him off in a perfunctory manner and tossed an olive drab army blanket over Dick before he left. At least that was warmer than the sheet, even if the wool scratched at Dick's skin.

He realised that he didn't know what time it was, let alone the day. He wanted to ask how long he'd been down there, but knew that neither John nor Becker would answer at all, and Carswell would probably lie. Had that last walk from the cells to the labs been the last time Dick would see the sky? He didn't even remember what it had looked like. He tried to cast his mind back, but came up with nothing. He'd been so focused on getting over the walls.

"It was cloudy," Nix said. "Low cloud, sticking in the tops of the trees."

"Thanks, Nix," Dick said absently.

"You're welcome," Nix answered. "Happy to make basic weather observations any time."

Dick didn't know why that was the thing that pushed him over the edge—a smart remark from the hallucination of his best friend—but he had to choke back a sob. He stared at the ceiling and forced himself to think of nothing until he was able to blink his eyes clear, and then sniffed back the tears. Carswell would not come back to find that he had been crying.

"Shut up, Lewis," Dick said, and Nix did.

Dick wished he hadn't said it.

* * *

Later, Dick didn't know when, Carswell brought Dick more of the meal bars. He had a strange energy to him, and sat closer than usual.

Dick flexed his free hand and rubbed at his skin. It was peeling away again, this time in thin sheets like a healed blister. The skin underneath was pink and new looking, but seemed normal enough. Dick's imagined lizard scales weren't coming in yet, it seemed. "What would happen if I stopped eating these?" Dick asked. "And you didn't make me eat them."

"At this point?" Carswell asked, and he thought about it. He seemed to like talking to Dick, which Dick found unsettling. "Your body would reject the substance like it would reject influenza. You would feel like you did when you stopped eating it, only much worse. It could be enough to kill you."

"And later?"

"Later it wouldn't matter. Once you've begun to change, the substance takes hold in you, and won't let go." He reached over and rubbed at the skin on Dick's right arm, watching it peel away. "Not long now, I think."

"Jesus," Dick whispered. He knew that the fear was written across his face, and nothing he could do would hide it. He thought about his earlier prayer, and repeated it, but fear choked him, and his silent words lacked conviction.

"I would be able to tell you how long if you would co-operate with some tests, Winters," Carswell said.

"Why in the world would I do that?" Dick asked. It was an impatience he couldn't afford, but playing at weakness didn't seem to be getting him anywhere anyway. How many men had played a long game of feigned helplessness and still died on this table?

"I would let you have this." Carswell pulled an envelope out of his clipboard and held it up just out of Dick's reach.

Dick recognised the handwriting before he even read the return address: _Lt. Lewis Nixon III, Company E, 506 Para. Inf. Camp Toccoa, Ga. _. Dick looked away.__

"No?" Carswell asked. "No to a letter from your friend? No to getting to move? No to finding answers?"

"No," Dick said.

Carswell frowned, but Dick knew it was artifice, knew this was a game still on its first move. "Perhaps your friend Lieutenant Nixon would be more co-operative. Would you like me to request his transfer to this posting. Your letter said he was interested in following you."

It was that easy. How could it be that easy? Three sentences, and he'd broken Dick in a way that days of torture hadn't. "What do you want me to do, sir?"

Carswell had the mercy not to smile. "Just what you did on the first day in the lab," he said. "Nothing more."

"I would like to see the letter first, sir," Dick said.

"Certainly." Gracious in victory, Carswell drew the single sheet from the envelope and put it in Dick's free hand. He was watching Dick's face, studying his reactions to the letter, either to see if there was a hidden message, or to see how much leverage Nix could provide. It could just be scientific curiosity, wanting to see how many emotions his subject could still display.

Dick shook the letter to open it, and he took a breath before focusing on the words.

> Richard,  
>  Please don't die of shock, but I've written you back! Consider the receipt of a rare Nixon letter the highest of honors. And no, the guys didn't get my anything for my birthday, and I miss you.
> 
> Sounds like it's boring where you are, but it's not much better here. Most exciting thing to happen was one of the C-47s going off the end of the Toccoa runway. No one hurt, but the one fellow who refused at the door sure wished he'd jumped. The other companies have gone down to a post with a longer runway to jump qualify, so there's nothing going on at Toccoa except the black swan trying to find out how much PT it'll take to kill us. As I doubt my services are vital to that experiment, I've asked for a week's furlough, and plan to head home.
> 
> While I'm in that neck of the woods, I'll swing down to P A and look in on your mom. I'll write again when I find out what's going on there. I do indeed know what the Winters family is like. Too bad you're sister's not five years older. You know how I feel about redheads.
> 
> Hang tough, buddy,  
>  Lewis.
> 
> PS: Sent you a couple novels. PX didn't have much you hadn't read.  
> 

Dick crumpled the letter in his hand and bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood, but he didn't cry. He didn't have to so much as blink. Nix had gotten his message, but what he meant about going to Lancaster, Dick didn't know. He didn't care either. Nix would be safely up in New Jersey by now, and though he wasn't immune to Carswell's treat of transfer, he wasn't actively trying to get to Fort Forrest.

It actually was the longest letter Dick had ever gotten from Nix or seen him write. He'd had the odd postcard from Fort Ord, from before they'd joined the 506th, but never an actual letter. That was real proof of how Nix felt about redheads, or at least this one.

"Who's the black swan?" Carswell asked. He pulled the letter from Dick's hand and smoothed it to reread.

"Our company commander, sir," Dick told him. Sobel and his petty tyranny seemed so far away now, a different life entirely. "Nixon never got along with him."

"Will you still co-operate with the tests, Winters?"

 _Hang tough_ , Nix had said, a favourite phrase of Dick's echoed back at him. Dick would try. "Yes, sir," he said. "May I have the books Nixon sent after?"

"We'll see," Carswell said, but seemed pleased. Likely because Dick had given him another point of leverage.

Extracting a promise of good behaviour didn't stop Carswell from treating Dick like a flight risk. No one in the room had a firearm, and all the sharp objects had been locked out of sight. Dick judged the distance between him and Carswell and didn't see how he could close it before Carswell got through the door. They'd done this before at Fort Forrest, and were too damn careful. Dick didn't think that threatening to hurt an orderly would get him anywhere with a man like Carswell.

The tests themselves repeated the first day in the lab: measurements, pictures, x-rays and blood samples. Dick did as he'd promised and let John manipulate his body and didn't shrink from his touch. He ran the words of Nix's letter over and over through his head, and tried to ignore what was happening to him.

"Here," Carswell said when John had taken the last picture. He tossed a pair of shorts at Dick. They looked like PT gear from Dick's own footlocker. Dick put them on before Carswell could change his mind, and told himself not to feel grateful that he was being accorded basic human decency. One small piece of cloth could make the difference between a man and an animal, it seemed.

Dick flinched away when John attached the metal plates to his chest and arms, but Carswell kept the setting on the machine low. Dick felt only the buzzing through his skin, not pain. He did push ups and pull ups until he couldn't any more, and then waited while the plates were moved so that he could run on the treadmill.

He liked being able to run again. After days tied up, even with his skin vibrating from the machine, the feel of his legs working and his body moving as it should lifted Dick's spirits. He'd been so damn proud of winning the first jump in the 506th, proud of what his body could do.

Now it could do more. Dick ran at what he thought was an easy pace to warm up, and realised that he was sprinting hard enough that the machine could barely keep up. He decided to settle on that and kept going. He kept going for hours. Eventually Carswell left and was replaced by Becker, and Dick still ran. He felt like he was walking briskly not sprinting at a pace that would have put him at the top of Currahee half an hour before anyone else.

Adrenaline coursed through his body and lifted him up. Dick couldn't think of a time when he'd felt better than this. It felt better than winning, better than feeling his chute open, better than sex with Nix.

His thoughts flew with him. This was the body that Carswell had promised, the ability to run as long as he wanted, and fight for days without sleeping. If more men were made like this and dropped behind German lines or on Japanese lines, what would just a company of paratroopers be able to do? He wondered if the men before him simply had been weak. The drugs had made his thoughts muddy before, but now he felt free and his mind was quicksilver.

"Remember why you're here," Nix said. "Hang tough, buddy."

Dick's pace faltered, and he almost lost his footing on the track speeding under his feet. He had to catch himself on the bars along side the treadmill while his mind spun. He had forgotten, both why he was at Fort Forrest, and why he'd agreed to co-operate that day. His pride had taken hold of him again, and made him vain about his earthly body.

It didn't matter if what Carswell and Becker were doing to him worked. How they were doing it was wrong, no, not wrong, evil. He remembered the teaching from Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans: _Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good._ It was simple. Nothing good could come of work done by men who would reduce a soldier to frantic pleas for help through a cement wall. _Save our souls_ , Dick thought.

He had to remember why he was here.

Dick kept running, knowing that Becker would know that he was slowing down on purpose, but the elated rush of energy passed, and soon his energy flagged with it. Soon he couldn't keep up more than a walk and slid to a halt, thumping back to the cement floor and breathing hard.

Becker made some notes on his clipboard and said nothing. John started to peel off the metal plates, and again Dick thought about trying to take him hostage. Becker seemed even less likely to bend on that point than Carswell.

"What is thirty six divided by six?" Becker asked.

Dick tried to think of it, but he couldn't answer. "I don't know, sir," he said, struggling to keep his voice even.

"What's four multiplied by eight?"

Dick had said these tables a hundred times as a schoolboy, had gotten a smack with a ruler across the knuckles when he'd forgotten one. He didn't remember. "I... twenty-four, sir?"

Becker shook his head slightly, mouth turning down in disgust. "What's five plus three?"

"Eight, sir," Dick answered promptly, and was pleased with himself, as pleased as he had been at age six when he'd first learned this. Nausea coiled in his stomach.

He couldn't answer the next three questions, but the addition one after that was okay. Becker shook his head set the clipboard down with a click. "Clean him up," he snapped.

John shoved Dick in the shower, and the water was still cold. Dick wondered if that was again simple cruelty on Becker's part, or if the hot water in the lab was broken. Dick was shivering and exhausted by the time they let him out, and didn't put up a fight when Becker ordered John to strip Dick and tie him down again. It didn't seem like there was any point.

Dick closed his eyes, knowing his wouldn't sleep but wanting to shut out the glaring lights of the lab for just a few minutes. He couldn't stand the sight of any of it any more. If he could sleep, maybe he would dream of Toccoa or even Lancaster. Dick murmured a prayer for release, and pressed his fingers to his mouth when he realised he'd said it out loud.

His left hand was free. Dick opened his eyes again, and blinked against the lights until he could focus on Becker standing above him. He was holding a hard-bound book.

"Carswell said that if you can manage this with one hand, you can have it," Becker said, he didn't sound too impressed by that decision.

"I can manage," Dick said, then belatedly added, "Sir."

Becker's eyes narrowed, but he put the book on Dick's chest on top of the blanket. "You'll start feeling the changes soon," he said.

Dick's fingers curled around the spine of the novel, but he didn't say anything. He didn't see the point of that either.

"Would you like to see pictures of the last candidate?" Becker said.

It was pretty easy to deduce from his tone that Dick definitely did not want to see the pictures, but he said, "Yes, sir."

Becker fished through the pocket of his lab coat and came up with a stack of glossy three by four black and white pictures. He didn't give them to Dick, but held the first one about a foot from his nose.

The man in the picture was dead, lying on a slab with his chest cut open for an autopsy, but Dick had seen dead men before and they hadn't had that shimmering pale cast to their skin, like a frog or the belly of a fish. It had no hair anywhere on its body. Its shoulders were too broad and its arms too long.

There was something wrong with his face, but Dick didn't see what until Becker removed the first picture and uncovered the second: a close up of its head. Its jaw was elongated and its nose flattened into slits. Death had curled its lips back, and the humanness of its teeth—his teeth, this had been a man once, Dick reminded himself—made a shocking contrast to the bestial face. His eyes were a man's too, light in colour—blue perhaps or pale grey—but half covered with horizontal lids.

The next picture showed his hands—wide and webbed, with nails grown into claws—the next the outgrown trapezoids of his shoulders and neck. He would have run on all fours as well as on two legs, Dick thought, low and dangerous, his mouth a mouth meant for ripping with the power of his neck and back behind that.

The fourth picture showed the nothing between its legs—his legs, he was a man once, like Dick was now—and Dick had to look away. It was more than enough.

Dick's mouth was dry, and he had to clear his throat before he could say, "I don't know how fast I could field strip an M1 with claws like that."

Beck snorted and tucked the pictures away. "We may have overshot on the transformation. As Major Carswell told you, the man was weak. What you are is yet to be seen. Enjoy your book."

Dick had folded the book between his forearm and biceps, tucked as close to his heart as he could hold it. It was from Nix, or that was the implication, and he should look through to see if he could find any message that Carswell might have missed. Dick should do something to distract himself from the images of what could be his future, if nor no other reason than to stave off the despair that now threatened to drown him.

He thought with horror of his earlier joy in his own speed, even though each step had carried him faster and closer to his own degeneration. If Nix hadn't been there to...

Nix wasn't here. Dick had done everything in his power to make sure that Nix would never be here. Dick was hallucinating Nix's voice like it was a cartoon angel on his shoulder.

The irony in that thought was enough to make Dick laugh so hard he started to cough. He tried to double up around his stomach, but the bonds kept his body flat, and in the end all he could do was hold onto the book until the fit passed.

"Something funny?" Becker asked, and Dick realised that he hadn't left, just gone to get a syringe. He injected it into the muscles of Dick's thigh and waited for an answer.

"No," Dick said, "thinking about angels."

"What you are is yet to be seen," Becker repeated to himself, but the twist in his mouth implied that he already knew. He left Dick alone in the glaring lights of the lab.

Dick wished he knew the answer too. He didn't know if he ever would now. Whatever the coming days proved, Dick very much doubted it would have anything to do with the quality of his character. Perhaps the dignity he could muster in the face of a horrendous death would prove valuable to God, but Dick couldn't see any other use for this ordeal. If only he could get free. He could kill this project and prevent this from happening to anyone else. Dick thought he'd be glad to burn with Carswell and Becker, if it came to it.

 _Please, God, help me find a way to end this,_ he thought, and wondered if this time God would answer.

Had the other man had a soul in the end, or had his body altered too much for a man to inhabit it? Dick had never before thought that was something he could be afraid of, but now the fear of it clawed at his heart. Yet, surely if God cared about even the fall of a sparrow, He couldn't abandon Dick to this. He'd abandoned that other man.

Dick stroked the cover of the book and wished that he still had Nix's letter. He remembered what it had said, but the exact wording was starting to fade in his memory: _I miss you, you know how I feel about redheads, hang tough._ What else had Nix said? He was going to Lancaster. No, that had been a code in Dick's letter. What did the coded reply mean? Or had Nix understood it? Maybe Nix had missed that part, and really was going to visit Dick's family. Only, he'd used the wrong names the same way as Dick had, a clear reply. What was going on?

"Hey, don't you trust me?" Nix's voice asked.

"Not to stay out of trouble," Dick answered aloud. It felt good to hear his own voice. He manoeuvred the book until her could read the spine. " _The Day Must Dawn_ ," he said. He hadn't read it, but then he hadn't really have time for novels in the army. Had Nix picked it for the encouraging title, or just grabbed something off the shelf at the PX? Dick had never thought he could miss the undersized Toccoa Postal Exchange.

He flipped the book around and pushed the cover apart with his nose, awkward and wrong handed. He thumbed to the frontispiece, hoping for an inscription, but there wasn't one, so he paged forward to the text. At least it would take his mind off of everything. Thinking in circles for hours didn't seem to be getting Dick any closer to getting out of there.

He found the first page, but the text refused to form into words. Dick closed his eyes for a moment and tried again. He could see each letter clearly, and if he focused on a word it turned into a word in his head, but stringing them all together didn't seem to work. Something was wrong. Dick had been able to read the title aloud. Just before he'd done the tests he'd been able to read Nix's chicken-scratch handwriting.

Dick cleared his throat and tried reading the words as they came, seeing if they made sense in his head. "'That fall of 1777, winter had set in early in the Back Country.'" That seemed to work. Saying the words let him focus on them in a way that reading silently could not. Why couldn't he read? Was it the substance in his blood, or the shot Becker had just given him, or was his brain changing? Was Nix's letter the last thing he would ever be able to look at and understand without sounding out the words like a child?

The open book dropped to his chest, and Dick pressed it against his heart and closed his eyes. He didn't know if the tightness in his chest made him want to scream or weep or both at the same time.

"I don't know if you've heard," Nix's voice said. "but the day must dawn."

"For the love of God, would you just shut up, Nix," Dick snapped, then felt an immediate wave of remorse. Dick refused to apologise to a hallucination, but the urge stuck with him. At least the imagined voice was some company. "I'm not getting out of this one, Lew," he said in a softer tone. "Even if I do, I don't think..." His throat closed on the words, which was good because Dick didn't want to say them anyway. "I can't see the sky," he said. He would never see the sky again.

Nix didn't answer.

Dick stared wide-eyed at the ceiling until his eyes stopped stinging. How long would it be until the second set of eyelids grew in, or had they already? Dick hadn't seen a mirror in who knew how many days. He wished he knew how many days. Nix's letter hadn't had a date, but with the speed the army mail worked, plus censors either way, at least six days must have gone by since Dick had sent his letter. Six days, or maybe ten, or even two weeks. It couldn't have been two weeks, could it? Dick had no idea how he would know.

He picked the book up again and repeated the first sentence. It came more easily to him this time, so he read the second one. The story didn't really register past that it was set on a farm in Pennsylvania, but Dick liked hearing the words. He liked that Nix had sent him this, even if he'd had no idea how badly Dick had really needed it.

Some time in the hours between torments, Dick's voice faded into a croak, and he let the book fall on his chest and drifted off into a half doze. He woke with pain deep in his bones, and knew he was changing.

When he picked the book up again, he couldn't read the title any more.

"The day must dawn," Dick said to himself, because his imagined Nix was silent.

* * *

After Dick had eaten his meal bars, Becker tested Dick's ability to hold his breath by holding a sheet of plastic over his face until Dick passed out. It took fifteen minutes, and Dick found something he feared more than force feeding or even the metal plates.

Later, when they hooked him up to the machine again, and sent flames of electricity coursing over his body, and Dick screamed his parched throat raw, he saw Nix standing at the back of the lab. He was crying openly, which Dick had never seen Nix do before, not even at his most vulnerable after sex. Dick tried to reach out for him, to offer or seek comfort, but his hands were strapped down again. He thought he might have screamed Nix's name while his body writhed on the table, but he couldn't be sure. Dick couldn't tell what was real any more.

Nix stayed with him after John tossed Dick back into the shower stall and turned the water on. Nix was partly inside the wall, which Dick appreciated. It made things more clear. Unless Nix could stand inside walls now. Dick didn't think that was likely, but what part of this was?

"Are you going to stay with me to the end?" Dick asked, and Nix nodded. He didn't seem to be able to speak any more, but Dick was glad to see him again. It was easier if he wasn't alone. Dick reached out to touch Nix's knee but his fingertips passed through Nix's ODs just the same as the icy water of the shower did. Oh well.

Dick's skin had started to peel again. He picked at it, and the layer underneath had an iridescent sheen like a fish scale. It felt oily under Dick's fingertips. He rubbed at it, trying to think. Carswell said the process would be irreversible soon. Was it already?

He took a deep breath and looked at the cement wall of the cell. He was shivering, and the muscles spasmed from the shocks, but he thought he could get up enough force to crack open his own skull. He was sure he could do it. That would end it. There would be no more pain, no more horror, his soul would be free for whatever judgement faced him after death. Would he be damned for that final act, or forgiven because of the trails he'd suffered? Perhaps it didn't matter. Dick knew it was the purest arrogance to even think it, but if hell was worse than this, he couldn't see how.

"I have a choice," Dick said. He looked at Nix to make sure that was right, and Nix nodded.

God, Nix. The real Nix was out there somewhere, maybe even looking for Dick. What if Carswell took Dick's suicide a justification to act on his threat? Nix would have to go though everything Dick had, without even the comfort of knowing his best friend was safe. Nix would know—because Becker would surely tell him—that everything Nix was suffering, Dick had suffered before him. Would Becker show Nix pictures of Dick's corpse cut open on a slab?

Dick slumped forward, resting his head forehead on his knees. "Hang tough," he muttered.

When he looked up, Nix was gone, and John was opening the door.

Dick sprang to his feet and shoved past John, trying to get to Becker or Carswell. They stood across the lab from him, looking up, just starting to realise what was happening. Dick leaped over the table he'd been tied to and reached for them. There was no time to find a weapon. He could do this with his own hands. He would do it with his teeth, if he had to.

The had made him into an animal, and he would kill them like a wolf would turn on any man who tried to tame it.

His hands closed on Carswell's throat, and Dick started to squeeze. He could hear Becker shouting and ignored him. His hands were slippery and wet, but he kept hold, it wouldn't be long now. Carswell went limp in Dick's hands.

One down. 

Dick started to turn, but Becker wasn't there. He was behind Dick. Before Dick could turn, a needle jabbed his neck. He felt his body start to slow, but the drug wasn't fast enough to keep Dick from backhanding Becker across the room.

Becker slammed into the table and fell forward on the floor. He was on his hands and knees, gasping, not dead. Dick would fix that. He closed the space in a single leap, like he had before. Dick's legs folded under him when he landed, and he kept going down, down, down until his face hit the cement. He tried to crawl forward, Becker wasn't even a foot away, but his arms wouldn't move when he told them to.

He was so close. A few more inches, and this would be over.

Dick looked up, hoping to see Nix one last time, but the lab had gone dark.

* * *

Dick woke not strapped to the table, but shackled to the cot back in his old billet. His footlocker was gone, and the chain on his leg wouldn't let him move enough to get to the walls. Dick turned his face to the pillow. He'd missed all of his chances, and now it was too late.

Becker came in later, and it was dusk outside, though Dick had no idea of what day. His nose twitched at the smell of fresh mountain air. Dick was grateful for that.

He tried to ask if he'd managed to kill Carswell, but couldn't get the words to form in his head. They'd failed, then, to make an intelligent creature. How many times had that been?

Becker said something, but Dick didn't listen. He thought he could make sense of the words if he tried, but what was the point? Dick rolled so that his back was turned his back on Becker. The door closed. The daylight disappeared for the last time.

The bed was nice, much softer than the lab bench. He was glad they'd put him back here for the end. That was why the man in #6 had been back in his cell, wasn't it? To die quietly and out of the way?

Dick felt a small glow of satisfaction that his death would mean that Becker and Carswell had failed.

He pulled the blankets more tightly around himself, glad for the warmth, and to have his arms free, and closed his eyes. He wished he could curl up, but the chain kept catching.

Dick tapped three soft taps, three hard, and three soft on the edge of the mattress a few times, and tried to form a prayer for all the men who'd been here before him.


	5. Chapter 5

Something was tugging at Dick's ankle. He opened his eyes and saw Nix working at the point where the manacle was chained to the bed. He was crouched on the floor with his face blacked out. He had always just looked like Nix before.

Nix's hair was rumpled, and Dick wanted to smooth it, but he didn't want to put his hand through him like he had in the shower, so he stayed where he was, watching. Tools clicked, and the chain came undone. Dick curled on his side, finally able to make himself into a ball like he'd wanted to.

"Dick. You're awake."

Dick nodded, still unable to form words. It was the first time Dick's hallucination had spoken while it was visible. That was nice. His imagined Nix was keeping his promise to stay with Dick to the end.

Nix was standing over him. He was wearing ODs with all pins removed, and a pistol on his hip, looking like he was at war already. Dick thought of Virgil leading Dante into hell. Was Nix his guide—a soldier for a soldier instead of a poet for a poet? Nix's hands hovered above Dick's body, not quite touching him. "Can you walk?" 

"Sure," Dick said, though he didn't know. He slid his legs off the side of the bunk and found that he could stand. He felt stronger now. The drugs must be wearing off.

"Think you should get dressed?" Nix asked, and Dick realised he was naked. He didn't have any clothes, so he shook his head. He would walk naked into death as he'd come naked into life. "All right then!" Nix held the door open, and gestured for Dick to step outside. The chain on Dick's ankle rattled as he walked.

The muddy ground was cold under his bare feet. Dick tipped his head back and looked up at the sky, but it was cloudy. He wished he'd been able to see the stars.

Nix had his pistol out, and was creeping back away from the barracks towards the obstacle course. Dick followed him. The air smelled sweeter than he could imagine.

When they had the barracks between them and the labs, Nix stopped and turned. There was almost no moonlight, and Dick could only see the gleam of Nix's eyes in the dark, but his own bare skin stood out bright against in the darkness. It wasn't very good camouflage. He thought of his botched attempt to kill Becker and Carswell, and how he'd gone in for the kill with no strategy at all.

"They thought they were making better soldiers here," Dick told Nix, "but they're just making monsters."

"I know," Nix said. "I saw the labs."

"Of course." Nix had been there the whole time. "Did I kill Carswell?"

"We need to go," Nix told him. He reached out and touched Dick's wrist, trying to pull him towards the fence. "Dick, come on."

Dick stood as though planted. Nix had touched him. Nix was still touching him. Nix's finger felt cold against Dick's skin.

"Nix?" Dick turned his wrist in Nix's hold until their hands rested palm to palm. He wanted to touch Nix's face, but he wasn't standing close enough, and Dick didn't feel as though he could move.

"Dick, _come on_ ," Nix insisted. His fingers interlaced with Dick's and he pulled harder. "If you can't run, we'll have to go with Plan B, and that's going to be a hell of a mess."

"You're here," Dick said. Nix was here. Dick couldn't imagine anything worse, but he was too weak to let go of Nix's hand. "Lew, you've got to get out of here."

"That's what I'm trying to do, goddammit!" Lew snapped, and yanked on Dick's arm with real violence.

"Did I kill Carswell?" Dick asked again. If he wasn't walking into the underworld, then he still had choices, and he needed to get the job done here. "Where's Becker?"

Apparently realising that Dick wasn't going to move, Nix stopped yarding on Dick's arm, and said, "There was a major with a snapped neck in one of the labs. I shot a captain who... uh... who wouldn't tell me where you were. I... I think he's dead. He's probably dead. I didn't see anyone else."

"All right," Dick said, and let Nix lead him away from the barracks.

There was a hole in the fence, and Dick crawled through it, not minding the scratch of wire against his bare back. They stopped long enough to use the cutters to remove the lock on the manacle, freeing Dick's ankle. Nix pitched the whole thing as far into the woods as he could, and pitched the cutters after.

Dick ran easily through the woods when Nix pointed the way. He didn't seem to need light to see, but avoided undergrowth and fallen trees by instinct. Dick kept hold of Nix's hand and led him forward confidently. Nix had trouble keeping up, and Dick had to remind himself that even before Dick had changed, he'd always been faster. Dick had easily beat Nix out when he'd won that first jump, so long ago.

They ran for miles—Nix stumbling and breathing hard, Dick flying through the woods—until Nix signalled a turn and they came out onto a logging road. Nix crossed to a pile of branches and uncovered a jeep. "Come on," he said. "I've got some clothes. No shoes though. I didn't think."

"It's okay," Dick said. The clothes were Nix's extra ODs, and they were too wide in the waist and too short in the cuffs, but Dick dressed gratefully. He smelled like Nix now, and like cotton and army soap. His feet and legs were filthy from the mud, and Dick had scratches he hadn't even felt—still didn't feel—all across his shins and calves.

Dick glanced over at Nix, trying to see if he was okay, but his face was hidden under layers of bootblack. He was moving all right, at least, putting his rank pins back on, and straightening his uniform. Nix scrubbed at his face with a handkerchief, but that only smeared the black worse, so he spat on the cloth and tried again, lifting a little of the dirt this time. His pale skin showed through along one cheekbone, bright like a flag.

"I didn't think you were real," Dick said. "I'd been hallucinating."

Nix looked up at him sharply. "When I was looking for you in the labs, I saw things," he said. "Restraints, machines, pictures of..." he couldn't finish that thought. "Did they do that to you?"

"Yes," Dick said.

"Jesus Christ. Are you all right?"

"I..." Dick felt all right. He felt better than all right, but he also felt very far away, like he was looking down at himself standing across from Nix, like he was still running lightly through the woods and would never stop. He still wasn't entirely sure Nix was real, or that Dick ever left the lab at all. The distance felt enough like the memory of a dream, that he wondered if he was still naked and tied to a lab bench with electricity coursing through him, and everything that had happened from seeing Nix in the shower to these first few moments of freedom was a dream. "I don't know. I don't think I can be."

"All right, come on," Nix said. He turned the jeep's engine over, and it sputtered and then took. Dick sat beside him. He drank from a canteen he found in the back seat and wondered if that water was drugged too.

Nix drove slowly, only turning the headlights on at intersections. Dick could point most of the turns out to him in the dark, and jumped out to open the forestry gate when they got to it. He still felt like he could run along side the jeep with little effort. Nix beside him, too focused on driving to talk, seemed unreal.

When they got to the main road that ran alongside the reservoir, Nix stopped the jeep and turned to Dick. "There's a decent hospital in Chattanooga," he said, "but I'm guessing you've seen enough of doctors for a while."

"We need to hide." Dick tried to put quiet urgency into his voice, but sounded panicked even to his own ears. "The army can't find me. Not until..."

Nix took a deep breath, and Dick saw indecision flicker across his face. Nix didn't want to know, Dick realised. Down in the depths of his soul, Lewis Nixon wanted to pretend this was all either a nightmare or a drunken hallucination. But this was Nix, and he was braver than that. "Dick, you'd better tell me until what."

Dick wished he knew for sure. Maybe it would have been more merciful to just let him die in his cell like he'd been so sure he was going to, but Nix had killed Becker, and that was something. Nix had killed for Dick. They were going to have to deal with that too. "It might be too late, Nix." 

"Goddammit!" Nix smacked the steering wheel with enough violence to make Dick jump. "It's not too late. We'll get somewhere safe and... and we'll figure it out."

"Okay, Nix," Dick said, and leaned back as Nix turned onto the road. He turned right, away from Chattanooga and the turn off to Fort Forrest, up state and east. The sky had begun to turn grey again, and Dick thought about the book. "The day must dawn," he said into the silence that stretched between them.

"Oh, you got my letter, huh?" Nix asked. He should have been keeping his eyes on the road, but he kept casting sideways glances at Dick.

"Yeah," Dick said. "They let me see it to"—he realised that he could never tell Nix about Carswell's threats—"bribe me into co-operating."

"I'm sorry," Nix said, and he sounded so low that Dick wanted to lean across and kiss him.

Only Dick didn't want Nix to feel his skin now. He touched Nix's knee lightly, hoping the meaning got across. "No, no, Nix, it kept me going. I was... uh, I was thinking of giving up, until I thought of you."

"That I was coming for you?"

"I didn't work that bit out." In retrospect, it was pretty obvious. Dick just hadn't imagined it was possible. "I should have expected, well, a miracle, I guess."

"Yeah, you should have," Nix said with some satisfaction.

Dick smiled at him then leaned his head back, revelling in the feel of the wind on his face and the scent of Nix's jacket next to Dick's skin. He didn't know what was coming down the road, but he was glad he'd gotten these few moments of relief before the end.

* * *

Dick slept off an on, and Nix drove without stopping through the morning. He felt his energy sapping away, and it seemed like the time that Carswell usually fed Dick and gave him that shot. Carswell was dead. Dick had killed him with his bare hands.

He looked out the window, watching the green hills roll past, and blessing every tree he saw. Dick had thought he'd never see the sky again, not even the clinging low cloud of Tennessee in the early autumn.

He woke again to Nix fast talking his way through a check point at the North Carolina border. Dick didn't have any papers, but Nix was talking and laughing, and pretending Dick was a drunk buddy, and the MPs were indulgent and bored.

They drove on, downhill now, winding through steep cliffs and canyons.

"I don't have my A.G.O. card," Dick said. He didn't have anything except the clothes on his back, and those were Nix's.

"Yeah, I know," Nix said. "I took a quick shuffle through the papers in the office, but didn't find it. Sorry."

That was going to be a problem if Dick survived the next couple of days. Surviving was going to cause a lot of problems, especially for Nix.

"What day is it?" Dick asked.

"Uh, October sixth, I guess." Nix yawned and stretched one arm then the other while keeping a hand on the wheel. "Yesterday was the fifth."

"Thirteen days." Two weeks before, they'd been getting ready for the final jump needed to qualify for his wings. Dick didn't have his wings any more either, though Nix was wearing his.

"I'm sorry it took so long," Nix said. His eyes were on the road, as they needed to be, but Dick could tell he was avoiding looking at him on purpose. "It took a while to find out... everything."

"It's okay." Dick wanted to ask how Nix had gotten in, but his thoughts drifted as he watched the road curve past. It reminded him of the Blue Ridge Mountains up past Lebanon country, but steeper and wilder. He didn't know country this wild still existed in the United States. He looked at the trees and half expected Daniel Boone to step out of the undergrowth with a musket over his shoulder. "Where are we going, Nix?"

"Somewhere safe," Nix said. "Try to get some sleep."

"All right." Dick closed his eyes again, and only woke when the tires crunched on a gravel drive and the jeep stopped.

They were in front of a half-timber house surrounded by tall maples, nothing else in sight past the long curve of a driveway behind them. It looked like something out of a illustration of the Brothers Grimm. The windows were shuttered, and no lights showed, but there was a power line.

"Is this your father's?" Dick asked as Lew stuffed things into his barracks bag. He didn't get out of the jeep, didn't feel like moving, really. His head had started to ache. There was a problem with going to a place the Nixons owned, but Dick couldn't think what it was.

"No," Lew said shortly. "Ritchie Sanford's. Buddy from Yale. We used to come down here in the summer. I know where the key is."

"Oh," Dick said. Nix had clearly thought of whatever it was.

Nix held the passenger door open for Dick, and when he didn't move said, "Come on. Let's get you inside." When Dick still didn't move, he shook Dick's shoulder lightly. "Come on, buddy. I can't carry you."

"Okay, okay," Dick levered himself out of the jeep and stood unsteadily, bracing on the windscreen for a moment before following Nix inside. The cabin had a big open foyer and sitting area, with high windows and deep leather furniture. Dick looked longingly at a couch that was long enough for even a tall man to stretch out on, but followed Nix upstairs to the master bathroom. He was leaving muddy footprints on the carpets, but that couldn't be helped. He liked how the piled wool felt under his feet.

"I'm going to turn the power on," Nix said. "Clean your feet, and you can have a bath."

"Okay," Dick said again. He sat on the edge of the giant claw-footed tub and wondered at a house used occasionally for parties that was bigger than his family home in Lancaster. His fingers felt clumsy, and Dick seemed to take an age to unbutton and strip out of Nix's ODs.

When he was naked again, Dick pushed to his feet and turned to face in the gilt-edged mirror that took up one side of the bathroom wall. He looked away immediately, then forced his eyes back to his reflection. He thought his shoulders were a bit broader, and his waist more tapered, but he'd also lost enough weight that he could see the edge of a hollow under his ribcage. The shape of his face hadn't changed, at least, though his hair was thinner. Dick stepped forward and peered at the reflection, but couldn't see any sign of secondary eyelids. He'd been avoiding looking at his hands, and did so now, finding his nails had thickened and deepened in their beds, starting to curl into claws.

His skin was what had made him flinch away the first time. The soft tanned skin on his arms and shoulders had started to peel as though burned, and under it Dick could see streaks of fish-belly iridescence and other streaks of pink new skin like what grew under a scab. Dick turned and looked over his shoulder at his back and saw the same pattern continuing. The bumps of his spine looked more prominent. Dick reached back and felt them, making his fingers move over the tears in his skin. He couldn't tell if they were sharper, or if it was just the loss if weight.

Dick had thought he'd felt the pain of his bones changing while he was tied to that table. He'd also seen Lew standing half way thought a wall, so his grip on reality hadn't been at its strongest. Now his head ached, sending shots of pain down his neck, and he could feel his chest tightening against his lungs, constricting his breath.

His legs were still covered in mud and bloody scratches. Nix had told Dick to clean them, and Dick d spent the whole time wool gathering and staring at his own reflection like darkly twisted Narcissus. Maybe he meant Medusa. Surely this was a reflection to turn a man to stone.

"Still have a great ass though," Nix said, coming back in, and Dick turned away to glare at him. It wasn't funny.

"Lew," he said in a low, thick voice. He didn't know what else to say. He didn't think he'd ever been vain about his appearance, but Dick had been proud of his strength, and he'd known that he was a reasonably handsome man, red hair and freckles aside. Now he was... Dick didn't even know.

"Hey, I'm sorry," Nix said, and closed the space between them, reaching out to pull Dick into his arms. It had been thirteen days since they'd kissed in the supply shed, when Dick had been whole. Dick flinched away, twisting out of Nix's reach.

"Don't," he snapped, and Nix froze.

For half a second, the hurt showed through in the widening of Nix's eyes and the little unhappy down turn in his lips, and then Nix's face stilled and smoothed. "Come on," he said, "let's get you cleaned up." He got Dick to sit on the rim of the tub again and filled a basin with lukewarm water. Before Dick could say anything, Nix knelt on the floor and started to wash Dick's feet.

"You don't..." Dick started to say, but Nix's fingers tightened on Dick's ankle and he shook his head tightly, a negation of anything Dick might say.

The soapy cloth felt soft on Dick's ravaged skin, and Nix's hands were infinity more gentle than John's had been when he'd wiped Dick's body clean after the first torture session. Dick kept his eyes open and focused on the top of Nix's head. He needed to remember where he was.

"I turned the hot water tank on," Nix said. "It should be warm enough for a bath in a few minutes."

Dick nodded, even though Nix couldn't see him. A bath might help. It would be good to feel clean again, and warm. He'd liked the bed in his billet because it was warm and soft. "This is going to be bad, Nix," he said.

Nix's hands froze, his fingers cupping the arch of Dick's foot as he wiped between Dick's toes. He didn't seem to care that Dick's toenails too had started to thicken and curl as well. "How bad?" he asked, looking up.

"I don't know," Dick told him. He tried to think, but all of the time in the lab had started to melt into an indistinct swirl of agony and terror. "Carswell said I would either keep changing, or my body would go back the way it was before. Either one would probably kill me."

"What the fuck were they doing?" Nix muttered. He let his head drop, resting his forehead on Dick's knees.

"I don't know," Dick said again. If he could forget what he did know, he would, but he knew he would never get Becker's photographs out of his head, nor the feelings of electricity and not being able to breathe. Or maybe he would. Dick could quite easily lose his mind in the next few days. "Lew, I can't keep changing. If I do, I might..." He stopped. He didn't know how to tell his best friend he planned to kill himself before he became a danger to everyone.

Nix reached across and started the bath, keeping his hand under the tap until he got the temperature right. "Get in the bath," he said. "I'll heat up some soup. We can talk after that."

"All right."

Dick climbed into the tub and let the warm water rise around him. It wasn't quite hot enough, even with the cold tap turned right off, but it was still the best thing he'd felt since that moment in the dark outside his cell when Nix's fingers had curled around his wrist. Dick turned the water off with his foot when it got up to his chin, then moaned and tipped his head back against the tub.

He didn't know what would happen next, but his current plan involved never leaving the bath. The warmth surrounding Dick eased his aching muscles, and the steam rising from the water helped him breathe more easily. He'd never thought he'd get anything other than cold showers, barely better than being hosed down like a cow. He'd never thought he would see the sky again, or Nix. Especially Nix.

Dick decided that whatever happened, he would try to stay alive as long as he could. Every moment of freedom was a gift from God.

Nix came in a minute later with two bowls of tomato soup and a plate of crackers. "Best I could find," he said. "I can drive into town later, get some decent groceries."

"No, no. This is great," Dick replied with probably too much enthusiasm. Even tinned soup was better than he'd eaten in weeks. He lifted his hands out of the water enough to take the bowl and tip it back. It rolled sweet and tart and smooth down his throat, and didn't taste at all like fish or something that was going to kill him. Dick drank his bowl, then drank Nix's bowl, and then sank back under the water until just his nose was sticking out.

It would be so easy to cover his nose and mouth and hold him under, to see how long he could still hold his breath. Dick pushed to the surface with a splash, shaking the water out of his hair. More short red hairs floated on the surface of the water.

"We're going to have to shave your head," Nix said. He reached out to smooth Dick's wet hair off his forehead, but Dick twisted away again.

"I..." Dick had almost said he didn't want to be touched, but that was so far from the truth that he couldn't even think it. "You don't have to," he finished instead. "I know how I look."

Nix had been kneeling on the floor next to the bath, and he rocked back on his ass to put some distance between them. "You must think I'm a shallow son of a bitch, huh?"

Dick didn't answer. He wasn't going to play this game. His muscles ached despite the warm water, and he just wanted to sleep for a million years. He pushed himself upright and grabbed a towel off the rack. Dick would have to replace it for Nix's friend. His skin kept sloughing off as he dried himself, showing more and more of the pale sheen underneath. He scrubbed his hair, and the towel came away red. Nix was right: Dick would need to shave. He realised that he hadn't shaved his face in over a week, but his face was still smooth. Tomorrow, he decided; he would worry about that tomorrow.

"I'm going to have a nap," he said. He crossed the hall to the master bedroom, Nix trailing in his wake. Of course the bed wasn't made up, but Nix had been here often enough to know where the linen cupboard was, and they made the palatial bed together. Dick didn't know cotton sheets could feel like these ones: heavy and cool and comforting all at the same time. He stripped and crawled under them and under the heavy down quilt, and curled up into the smallest ball he could.

When Nix started to draw the curtains, blocking the maple leaves and the slice of grey sky, and Dick snapped, "Leave them be!"

He didn't know why he said it until he realised that he didn't want to be in the dark again. He couldn't think of a way to explain that that'd sound less pathetic than his outburst, so he stayed quiet.

Nix left the curtains, and Dick felt the bed dip as Nix settled on the far side, then the soft weight of Nix's hand on his shoulder. "Anything you need?"

He needed Nix to stay, but didn't know how to ask for that, either, so he shook his head.

"Okay," Nix said. He hesitated for a few moments, then squeezed Dick's shoulder and got up. "I'll be around."

Dick deliberately did not listen to his footsteps, but focused on pulling in one steady breath after another. He needed to not cry. He'd gotten through the whole ordeal without Carswell seeing his tears and he wouldn't now.

Carswell was dead, Dick reminded himself. Dick had killed him.

The certainty of that thought lulled Dick into an uneasy sleep.

* * *

Dick clawed back awake feeling nauseated and slow. His bones ached, and he didn't want to risk moving, but he didn't want to throw up in the bed either. The covers were heavy and too hot. Dick rolled out of bed and onto his knees on the floor, and hunched there panting for a minute. Where had Nix gone? Dick had sent him away, and now he needed help.

No, Dick would be fine. He could look after himself. He grabbed the bedside table and pulled himself up, then stumbled towards the bathroom. It was going well until he got to the hallway and tripped over Nix's legs.

"What?" Nix asked blearily, but Dick caught himself on the doorframe and kept going. He'd gotten a flash of Nix slumped against the wall outside the bedroom and the glint of a bottle, and that was all. "You okay?" Nix called after him.

Dick didn't answer. He clung to the toilet even after he was done, breathing hard, trying to put the world back into order. His head was still spinning, and now his throat felt raw and sourness and bile filled his mouth. Dick considered curling up on the cool tile floor and staying there.

"Here," Nix said, fingertips touching Dick's bare shoulder. He held a glass of water in front of Dick's nose. He waited until Dick had rinsed his mouth and spat and drunk again before he asked, "You need anything?" His words were a little slurred, and Dick could smell whiskey on his breath.

Dick slumped over and let his head rest against the rumpled shirt of Nix's ODs. "No," he said. "I don't think there's anything to do."

Nix rubbed Dick's back, palm sliding up and down his spine. If he was repulsed by what Dick looked like now, he wasn't letting it show in his movements. "Want to try go back to bed?"

"Can we, uh, can we just sit here?"

"Sure," Nix said. He pulled the chain in the toilet and settled back on the floor, pulling Dick sideways against him. "How do you feel?"

"Awful," Dick said, and tried to smile as Nix chuckled. "Feels like the flu: aching muscles, headache, nausea."

"I got that far," Nix said. He traced circles on Dick's biceps, and heaved a sigh. "You should probably finish that."

Dick nodded, but didn't make any move to pick up the glass of water. What made sense and what he wanted to do didn't seem very well aligned just then. He wanted this to be over, or better still to never have happened. Dick had never feared pain before. He'd wrestled in college, and in the summers painted electric towers—hanging upside down high above the earth—and lived a rough and tumble life in the dirt with his men all through training. He was used to pain, and used to pushing it aside and getting the job done anyway. Now, he dreaded what was coming. He pressed his face deeper into Nix's shirt, breathing in his scent, and muttered, "I don't know if I can do this, Lew."

"Sure you can," Nix said, though he didn't sound convinced. He sounded like he wished he'd brought the bottle. Dick didn't blame him. He'd have drunk himself unconscious by now if he were Nix. If he drank at all.

Whatever Nix had signed on for when they'd joined the airborne together, being clung to by a shivering half-monster probably wasn't it. Nix had already done more than Dick had imagined possible by springing Dick.

Dick should ask him to leave. It would be better to face whatever this was alone, especially if his transformation was going to continue, and Dick had to end it all before he turned into a mindless beast. It wasn't fair that Nix should be here for that part. None of this was fair to Nix. Instead of saying anything, Dick tightened his hold on Nix's arm and listened to the beat of his heart.

Eventually, Nix pressed his lips to Dick's forehead, and said, "You're burning up. You need to drink some more water and go back to bed."

"Sure," Dick muttered. He didn't want to move, but clearly Nix did, so he finished the glass of water and then let Nix get up and pull Dick to his feet. "What were you doing on the floor?" he asked as the passed the place where he'd tripped on Nix's legs.

"I, uh," Nix paused, looking down at the bottle, "thought you might need me."

"You could have...." Dick stopped. He'd almost said Nix could have shared the bed, but he didn't know if he would be able to stand that. He didn't know if he'd be able to stand being alone again either. He went over to the bedroom window and looked out. It must be after sunset; the clouds had deepened form silvery to charcoal grey. Dick had slept for hours.

Nix turned a lamp on, and Dick flinched. He didn't know if it would be more difficult to sleep in absolute darkness not knowing where he was or with the lights on all the time like they had been in the lab.

"Dick?" Nix asked softly. With the light on now, Dick could see his reflection in the windowpane. He was hovering by the bed, hands jammed in his pockets, expression uncertain.

"It's all right, Lew," Dick said, though he didn't think any of it was, or could be again. His legs felt so wobbly that he had to brace himself on the window frame, and every muscle in his body ached, but he didn't want to move yet. "Good to see the sky again."

"Oh," Nix said, more a soft puff of breath than a word, like he'd taken a hit to the ribs. "There was a table in the lab with restraints. Did they keep you"—he paused and regrouped; they both knew the answer to that one—"do you know how long you were there?"

"No," Dick said. "Too long. I thought I would die down there, then I was, uh, guess I was scared I wouldn't die. They showed me pictures of..." That time he was the one who couldn't finish. He was still so goddamn afraid. His vision blurred as he blinked back tears again, so he missed Nix crossing the room until he put his arm around Dick's shoulders.

"I know," Nix said. "That's not going to happen to you."

"You can't know that."

"I can. I do." Nix's voice shook when he said that, and for a moment, Dick didn't understand why. Then he realised that Nix had understood what he'd meant earlier about Dick ending his life before he changed.

"Thank you," Dick said. "For everything." He sniffed loudly and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "I'll try get some more sleep."

"Okay." Nix pulled Dick against his side, his hand cool on Dick's shoulder. "You want me to stay?"

Dick had no idea. He really didn't want to be alone, but he knew that whatever happened next was going to be ugly, and he wanted to spare Nix as much of that as he could. He looked at Nix's reflection in the window, and saw the exhaustion lining his face. When was the last time Nix had actually rested, not just sprawled in the hallway with a bottle? "Why don't you get some sleep too, huh?"

Nix bit his lip, clearly torn. "I don't know..."

"There's another bedroom down the hall, right?" Dick said. He felt too drained to know what to say to make Nix do what he wanted without hurting him. "Go. I need to..."

"Okay," Nix said, but he didn't leave Dick's side until Dick was back in the bed. "Scream if you need anything."

It was meant lightly, but Dick was afraid it would turn out to be literally true. When Nix was gone, he kicked most of the blankets off, and slept under just the sheet, then couldn't stand the feel of just cotton on his sweaty skin, and burrowed under the blankets again. It was too hot, but he felt like he was in a real bed, not strapped to a table.

He left the lamp on but turned his back to it. The warm glow it gave the room looked hazy and unreal.

* * *

Everything hurt. Dick curled in on himself and when that made it hurt more, he wrapped his arms around a pillow. He was glad that Becker had put him back in his cell. He didn't want to be strapped to the table any more. It was too hot here, but he had a soft cot and blankets, and the light wasn't so bright. How long would he have before they put him back on that table?

He thought about going to the sink and seeing if the man in #6 was still there, or maybe if there was a new person, but they'd taken Dick's footlocker. He wouldn't have anything to hit the pipe with. Maybe his claws would work. Was that what the other man had used? Carswell had cut the man in #6 open after he'd killed him.

Hadn't Dick's leg been chained to the bed? It wasn't any more. That was better. He was able to curl up now.

The worst part of the electricity was not being able to curl in on himself as his muscles spasmed and tore.

Dick remembered Nix unbolting the ankle chain, and the cutting it off. That had been later, outside the fence. Or had that been a dream? It seemed more likely that Becker had unbolted his leg, and Dick had dreamed Nix's miraculous rescue.

He could test that. All Dick would have to do was open his eyes and see if he was in a bedroom or a cell. He could call Nix's name, and Nix would come, or he wouldn't.

Dick didn't know what he would do if it had been a dream. He kept his eyes closed, and hoped to drift back to sleep. If it was a dream, he wanted to go back to it. He wanted to sleep forever, and never wake up to the horrors of what was to come.

He wished it didn't hurt so much.


	6. Chapter 6

It was too hot. Dick tried to kick the covers off, but his legs didn't seem to be working right. Was he tied down again? Why would they tie him down on his side? He had a pillow still, so he didn't think he was tied down.

He didn't want to say that he was too hot, or that it hurt. He remembered Carswell's chilly, "Of course," the first time Dick had admitted to pain. He remembered more the avid attention on Carswell's face. Admitting that it hurt just made Carswell and Becker hurt Dick more.

A cool damp cloth touched his forehead, and Dick flinched away. That would be John wiping him down like he was a dirty table. Dick wished they'd just toss him in the cold shower instead. He'd liked that better. Nix was there sometimes, half inside the wall.

"Easy there," Nix's voice said, and Dick was glad his hallucination was talking again. He hadn't liked the silent, anguished watching.

Dick tried to say he was sorry, but his throat was too dry to speak, or maybe he'd forgotten the words again. Had that been a side effect of the drugs, or was it the change itself?

Carswell's hand cupped the back of Dick's neck, cool and clinical, all of its kindness an artifice of the real thing, and the rim of a glass touched Dick's cracked lips. Dick sipped the water as it was given to him. He didn't care if it was drugged any more. There'd been a chance to end this, in the shower while Nix had watched untouched by the spray, and Dick had let it pass him by.

"That's right, Dick," Nix's voice said. "Drink up." The cool hand touched Dick's forehead, and Nix muttered, "Christ, you're burning up."

"Fine," Dick muttered, and Nix laughed. The hallucination of Nix had never laughed before.

"You aren't," Nix said fondly.

Rough hands pulled Dick out of bed and dragged him away. The floor was soft here, not the cold bare cement, not until they got to the shower stall. Dick squinted, but his vision swam, and he couldn't make out much more than light and dark. This was bigger than the shower stall he'd been in before, and the floor was white.

"Help me out here, pal," Nix said from beside Dick. "You're too big to carry."

Dick blinked hard, and his vision didn't clear, but he did see Nix now, rumpled and unshaven, and he saw that they were in the bathroom from before.

"Sorry," Dick murmured. He wasn't able to lift his leg over the edge of the high bathtub, but he did hold onto Nix's shoulders as Nix lowered him in. "Sorry," he said again.

Nix sighed and didn't answer, but turned the taps on and started to fill the tub. The water was cool but not cold like the shower had been, and it soothed Dick's skin as it rose around him. He was shivering, but not from cold, and not from the heat either. His muscles felt like they had on the table, after Carswell had switched his machine off, weak and flinching with the memory of pain. His head ached, and every sound or movement made the throbs of pain pound deeper into Dick's skull.

Dick wasn't still in the lab at Fort Forrest. Nix had rescued him. Nix was looking after him.

"Thank you," Dick said again, and, "Sorry," for good measure.

Nix sank down on the floor next to Dick and leaned his head against the rim of the tub. "I'm going to get you to put all those sorrys in writing," he said, "so I can haul them out next time you're being a bastard about PT."

"Sure." It was nice that Nix thought that things would go back to the way they were before. Even if Dick survived, he didn't think that was how it would go. He suspected spending the rest of his life in prison was a hell of a lot more likely, or the army just shooting him. What would they do to Nix? Dick had to figure out a way to take it all on himself, but he couldn't see how. He couldn't think past the pounding in his head.

Dick turned the water off and slumped down until it came up to his chin. He was still wearing Nix's shorts. They'd need to find a way to do laundry, or buy more clothes. Would that matter? Dick still didn't know if he'd live long enough to need clean clothes, let alone a uniform. Dick should put down something for Nix to have, a confession maybe, rather than an apology.

"I don't know if I can write," Dick said.

"What?" Nix sounded sleepy and muddled, and Dick wondered if he'd gotten any rest at all. Dick stroked Nix's hair back away from his face, his wet hand dampening it and holding it in place. Nix leaned into his touch like a cat.

"I couldn't read, at one point," Dick said. "I was trying to read your book, and the words didn't make sense."

He didn't know why he was telling Nix this, it would only upset him, but he wanted someone else to know. If Carswell and Becker really were dead, John the orderly was the only one who'd seen what they'd done to Dick. What had happened to him? Two officers dead and one missing. Someone must have raised the alarm. There would be a search.

Maybe this was _Dorian Grey_ , and Dick wanted to make his last confession so that he could start anew, or slash at his own image until he died.

But like Lord Henry in the novel, Nix didn't seem interested in confessions. Instead he got up and left the room. Dick watched him go, noting the drag in his steps and the way his shoulders hunched. Nix hadn't rested after all, and now he was leaving.

Dick closed his eyes and tried to focus on the cooling feel of the water on his skin. He felt a little better now, he thought. He hoped Nix would come back soon.

"Can you read this?"

Dick blinked until the book Nix's was holding in front of him came into focus. " _The Keys of the Kingdom_ ," he said, reading the title page. Nix flipped to a random page, and Dick squinted. His vision was better, but he couldn't make out the fine text. He leaned up closer, and read a few a paragraph silently to himself. "Yes," he said. "I can read that."

Nix grinned at Dick. "You'll be memorising infantry manuals again any day now."

"Sure," Dick said. He tried to stand, but his leg muscles still weren't working right, and putting pressure on them sent waves of cramps up his calves and through to his back. He grunted and doubled up on himself, gritting his teeth in frustration. His thoughts had cleared for a few minutes, but he could feel the fuzziness rolling back in on him, rising like winter fog on the fallow fields. He scrabbled and splashed, trying to get out of the bath before he drowned himself, but couldn't get any traction.

It was Nix who thought to pull the drain, and Nix who hauled Dick out onto the rug beside the bath, half soaking himself in the process. The lay in a tangled pile of limbs on the floor, both breathing hard. Dick's hands caught at Nix's shirt and held tight. Nix felt so solid and alive under him, and Dick didn't want to let that drift back into the uncertainty of nightmares.

Dick shivered, and thought it might be from the cold. Nix wrapped Dick in his arms and held him close, not seeming to care that Dick looked like a half-skinned drowned rat. Nix pressed Dick's head to his chest and let him listen to his heartbeat. Dick tried to focus on the steady thud under his ear, but his thoughts were already skittering away.

He hated how this kept coming in waves, and he could never tell if he was at the end of one or not. If he'd had the flu, he'd be working slowly on a recovery, but this felt like just the start, and he didn't know if there would be an end. Every fibre of his soul felt worn thin with exhaustion, but he didn't know if he could sleep for how hard he was shaking.

"Hey, easy there," Nix said, and stroked down Dick's back. His fingers bumped over the knots of his spine, and Dick again wondered if they felt different but was still afraid to ask. He didn't want to know if he was still changing. He just wanted to lie here on the floor and let himself be held. "I swear it's going to be okay," Nix said, though of course he couldn't know that either.

Again Dick wanted to beg Nix not to leave him, even though it didn't seem like he would, but he stayed silent and tried to push himself to his feet. It didn't work. He had the co-ordination of a new calf, and no strength at all. When he tried to lift his head, a bolt of pain shot into his temples and he whimpered despite himself.

Nix's hand tightened on the back of Dick's neck, and he pulled him in tighter. "I'm going to save you," he said, but now he sounded like he was trying to reassure himself as much as Dick.

Dick nodded a little to let Nix know that he'd heard and he appreciated the effort, but he didn't know if that would make a difference in the end. At least not a difference in what the outcome would be. Dick knew it was unspeakably selfish, but having Nix with him through whatever happened made the world of difference to him. "I'm glad you're here, Lew," he murmured, in case he didn't get a chance to say it later. "Thank you."

"Where else would I be?" Nix asked. He rolled Dick off him as gently as he could and went to find some towels to mop up the mess and dry Dick as best he could. The soft cotton towels against Dick's ruined skin felt infinitely different from John's indifferent scrubbing. Dick managed to kneel up enough to get his shorts off, and dry himself. His hands shook with the effort, but he wanted to do something himself, not be moved around like a doll, even by gentle hands with the best intentions.

Nix had to haul him back to the bedroom, holding one of Dick's arms across his shoulders and taking most of the weight while Dick tried to help walking. Nix grunted and swore, and his shoes squeaked on the wet tiles. He tried to turn Dick to let him down easily on to the bed, but his hand slipped on Dick's damp skin and ended up dumping him face first into the disarranged bedclothes.

Laughing, Nix asked, "You still glad I'm here?"

Dick flopped onto his back, his legs were still hanging off the side of the bed, and his heels dug uncomfortably into the floor. He couldn't seem to catch his breath even though Nix had done most of the work. "Always," he gasped out, anyway.

Nix shook his head like he thought Dick was an idiot, and bent to help manoeuvre his legs into bed. The sheets were clammy with perspiration, and they should change them, but Dick didn't think either of them had the energy. Dick would just ruin them again anyway.

For a moment, as Nix was crouched over him trying to untangle legs and covers, his mouth was inches from Dick's cock. He didn't seem to catch it until he saw Dick looking, then froze, looking up at Dick with wide, blood-shot eyes.

"Do you want..." Nix started to ask, but Dick shook his head, which only made it ache more, and he winced.

The truth was he did want that, wanted something to feel good for once, but Dick couldn't risk that Nix might catch something from him, and he didn't think his body was up to it anyway. He felt too awful to appreciate even Lewis Nixon's talented mouth on his cock. "Later," Dick said, and hoped that there would be a later.

"Later," Nix agreed, and pulled the blankets back up over Dick. He opened the window a crack to let some air in, and then came back to the bed. His expression was drawn and wan even in the warmth of the lamplight, and Dick didn't think Nix could have slept at all in the last few days. Had he been so worried that he'd miss any cry for help from Dick that he'd forced himself to stay awake while Dick was passed out and wrecked with fever?

Dick shivered again and huddled deeper in the blankets. The bath had been too much, and now he couldn't seem to get warm. He was too skinny now, even more than he'd been at Toccoa, and couldn't seem to hold onto any heat.

"Do you mind if I..." Nix asked.

If Nix wanted to share, well maybe that would finally get him to sleep, if Nix could sleep next to whatever Dick was turning into. Dick would worry about hurting Nix, except he didn't have the strength to swat a fly right now.

"All right," Dick said, and curled around his pillow again.

The bed shifted under Nix's weight, and then Nix was lying on his back next to Dick, his shoulder touching Dick's spine. There was enough room in the bed that they didn't have to sleep so close, but Dick was glad that Nix wanted the comfort of touch as much as Dick himself did. He wished he had the courage to roll over and curl up on Nix's chest, the way they'd been lying on the floor. The few times they'd had leave together, they'd slept like that on narrow Red Cross cots. Then, Dick had wished for a life time of nights spent tangled each other's arms. That had seemed impossible even then, and unthinkable now.

Maybe this was Dick's last night on Earth; it could be for all he knew. He uncurled and rolled over, carefully edging closer to Nix. He moved slowly so that Nix could object or roll away if he wanted to. Nix stayed where he was, so still he was hardly breathing as Dick rested his head on Nix's shoulder and laid his arm across Nix's chest. Nix was down to shorts and his undershirt, and Dick was still naked.

"Feeling a little better?" Nix asked. The lamp was still on, but Nix didn't move to turn it off. Dick had his back to it and kept his eyes closed. If he was going to dream, he wanted it to be of this moment stretched out forever, a lull between the fever of the evening, and whatever lay ahead. Dick's head still throbbed with pain, but even that seemed less with Nix's stubbly cheek cool against Dick's forehead.

"Yeah," Dick said. "A little." He didn't know how to describe what he felt, so he let the silence rest between them.

Eventually, he slept.

* * *

If Dick dreamed at all, he didn't remember it, or perhaps he just didn't know what was real after all. He felt hot again, and tried to struggle free of the covers, but felt helpless under the weight of them, and trying just made everything hurt more. Dick lay still on his back, as still as if he were strapped down again, and focused on taking one breath after another.

Nix seemed to be there, but Dick couldn't make sense of his voice. He felt a glass held to his lips and drank, a cool cloth on his forehead and closed his eyes under it. He understood this time that he was free, but for how long he didn't know.

His skin itched, but when he tried to scratch, Nix took Dick's wrists and told him something sharply. Dick didn't have the strength to get away.

The covers had disappeared, and Dick tried to find them again, not liking being naked and exposed. Again Nix's hands held him down, and a damp cloth scrubbed over Dick's skin. It hurt and felt good at the same time. Dick tried to say something, but he didn't think the words came out in the right order.

Nix shushed him and kissed his cheek. Dick wanted a real kiss, but knew that he couldn't have one. Nix wouldn't want to do that any more.

After the kiss, the blankets fell heavily on top of Dick, and he wasn't able to move again. He decided that he liked this better than being left bare. It felt like winter mornings under his grandmother's quilts. Or like being buried in the snow: cold and hot at the same time. He wondered if it ever snowed in North Carolina; maybe it did this close to the mountains.

The were the same mountains here. Dick pictured the line of them, how they came down from the Blue Ridge Mountains behind where he'd grown up down the spine of Virginia, how they divided east from west. They'd go past here and past Camp Forrest all the way to to Toccoa.

There was poetry in that, Dick thought, maybe something by Whitman, but it wasn't coming to him, all he could think of was snatches of a rhyme he couldn't remember the words of. He hummed the tune of it and wished he could roll over and hug his pillow again. That had felt better. He twisted back and forth and finally managed to flop onto his stomach, then realised he didn't have the pillow.

Nix had been Dick's pillow earlier. Where was he? It seemed like he'd left, but Dick couldn't remember when. After he'd put the blankets on? Where had Nix gone.

Dick's throat felt too raw to call out, but he whispered Nix's name with no response.

All Dick could think of was that Nix had left.

Dick had wanted that earlier, hadn't he? He'd wanted to spare Nix what was going to happen next.

This would be better, Dick decided. He curled up again and hummed the rhyme to himself, which he eventually realised was "Ring Around the Rosie." That seemed fitting, even if Dick couldn't remember all the words.

Lying on his side like this, he could see the square of the window, and the light of a sliver of sky behind the trees. It was dawn, and the clouds had finally lifted. Dick watched the light change from pink to gold on the high clouds and feeling like every moment he could see the sky was a pure blessing from heaven.

Even if this was the closest to God Dick ever got, this was enough.

* * *

Nix was back. He'd taken the covers and ran his hands up and down Dick's body, slow and assessing.

When Nix spoke, Dick understood the words. Nix said, "I don't know if this'll help, but worth a shot, huh?" Which admittedly Dick didn't understand until he felt the prick of a needle in his ass. 

Dick thought of Carswell and his endless injections, and tried to twist away, but it was too late.

"It's just sulfa," Nix said. "I don't know if it'll do any good, but maybe it'll kill whatever you're fighting off. Can't make it any worse, right?"

Dick didn't know if that was true, but he figured Nix was the one of them with the better head on his shoulders at the moment, so he lay where he was and stared out the window. The morning was bright and the sky blue. He wanted to ask Nix to haul Dick outside so that he could see it, but knew that was too much to ask, no matter how much he wanted to feel the sun on his face. He didn't think being dropped down the stairs would help anything anyway, and he didn't think Nix could manage his dead weight.

"Try to drink more," Nix was saying, hand on the back of Dick's neck to lift his head. This time Dick knew it was Nix, not Carswell, and let himself be moved and fed water. "You're sweating buckets."

Nix set Dick's head down and fussed with the sheets, but his movements were tentative, and Dick could feel the hesitation in them. Finally Nix walked out of the room again.

Dick curled in on himself and tried not to whimper.

When Nix came back, he settled on the bed behind Dick, between him and the lamp. He rested one hand on Dick's hunched shoulder, heavy and solid. Dick heard the rustle of paper, and then Nix's voice reading steadily. It was the book he'd gotten Dick to read earlier, about a young boy in Scotland a hundred years before.

Lulled by the sure sound of Nix's voice, Dick drifted in and out of sleep. Every time he woke enough to be aware of where he was, he looked out the window, listened to the soft rise and fall of Nix's words and felt the weight of his hand on Dick's shoulder and the solid feel of Nix's hip against Dick's shoulder blades.

It was enough.

* * *

Dick woke with a clear if still aching head just in time to watch the sunset catch in the treetops. Nix had fallen silent, and when Dick gingerly turned over, he found Nix slumped against the headboard, neck at an awkward angle, book open in his lap. His hand had fallen off Dick's shoulder.

Nix's face was grey with exhaustion, and even in sleep the worry lines hadn't eased from his brow. Dick wished he knew how to smooth them, but couldn't think of a way.

It felt easier to move at least, and Dick rolled out of bed and tried his luck at standing, holding the headboard to steady himself. Behind him, Nix murmured in his sleep, a small unhappy sound. Feeling like he could keep his balance, Dick circled the bed and prodded at Nix until he slumped over sideways, eventually sprawling across the bed on top of the blankets. Nix groaned in protest again, but didn't wake. Dick let Nix lie and hoped that he'd catch up on sleep.

Dick had to keep a hand on the wall as he shuffled into the bathroom, but standing at all was such a breakthrough from the day before that Dick wasn't going to complain. When he was done using the toilet, Dick took several long breaths before he gathered the nerve to consider facing the mirror. 

He knew he had to face this quickly or not at all. He would either look and see a silver-skinned monstrosity that would have to find an end, and soon or something like himself again. He thought he felt like himself, but doubt still clung to Dick's heart. He'd felt like himself before when he'd been running so fast he could nearly fly, and felt like hell when his body was struggling to fight free of the drugs.

Dick just had to get it over with, like the first time jumping out of a C-47. He turned, and made himself look.

His face was still his own, though all his hair down to his eyebrows had fallen out, which was strange to consider. Even in basic training Dick had never gone for a crewcut look. His skin had changed to a bright, sunburned pink, and looked like it was going to start peeling again, but as close as Dick looked, he couldn't see any sign of the fish-belly shimmer. Again Dick studied his eyes, but could see no change there. He still had claws, but maybe his nails would grow out normally.

He'd lost far too much weight. How much chow would it take for Dick to get back up to fighting strength again? He couldn't imagine walking down the stairs to the sitting room, let alone running Currahee.

Dick didn't know why he was thinking about the airborne. He and Nix should probably focus on escape to a neutral country.

Later. They would worry about it later. All Dick cared about now was that he was free of the thing that had lurked in his blood and threatened to swallow him whole, and that he was free of Fort Forrest. As much as his body still ached, Dick would never be tied down to a table and tortured again.

Buoyed by those thoughts, Dick made his way back to the bedroom and curled up behind Nix on the bed. The barely fit, lying sideways like that, but Dick snuggled close and pulled the blankets half over top of them. Nix stirred and wiggled his ass as he tried to get closer to Dick, but didn't wake.

* * *

Again Dick woke with the sunrise, still wrapped around Nix. He'd kicked the blankets off in the night, and his back was cold, but he didn't want to move. Nix was soft and warm in his arms, and this felt like all Dick had ever wanted.

Dick nuzzled aside Nix's undershirt and kissed his shoulders and the back of his neck. Nix stirred, making a pleased, sleepy sound, and Dick sneaked his hand under the edge of the undershirt and started running it up and down his chest. He was getting hard just from the feel of Nix shifting against him, and knew that Nix would be as well. They'd had a handful of sleepy mornings together over the last few months, and Dick held the memory of each one close.

"Okay way to wake up," Nix murmured, voice still heavy with sleep.

"I can..." Dick said, his hand trailing down below Nix's bellybutton.

"Oh yeah." Nix sounded much more awake on hearing that suggestion. "Here." Nix shuffled sideways a little and flopped on his back. He folded one arm behind his head and looked up at Dick. "Guess you're feeling better, huh?"

"Yeah," Dick admitted. He didn't want to talk about anything that had happened, so he pushed Nix's shorts down and started to stroke him.

"Here," Nix said again, and put his left hand on Dick's hip, his thumb lying on the crease between his legs and his stomach.

Dick went still. He didn't know if what Nix was offering would be too much like thinking of what had happened. What if his body didn't respond the way it had before? What if touching Dick's weird hairless skin turned them both off and ruined the whole morning? Dick was on the verge of doing that anyway. He just wanted to make Nix happy, and now Nix was frowning up at him, worry written all over his face. So Dick said, "Sure!" and rolled onto this back so he wouldn't have to see Nix's face if this all went wrong.

It didn't though. They lay on the rumbled quilts and touched each other, and it felt the same as it always had.

Dick had been a virgin when he'd met Nix, which had lasted roughly two weeks into OCS. Nix had showed Dick so many ways to make his body feel good, and they'd made up a few more together. As the rush of pleasure overcame them, Dick wished that they had time for all of them that morning.

Instead, he wiped his hand on Nix's stomach and rolled back to his side. He propped his head up with one arm, and looked down at Nix. He still had his eyes closed, and his face was flushed and shiny. The worry lines had faded a little. Nix had been biting his lip, and how it was plump and full. Dick leaned down and kissed him lightly.

"Lew, we need to talk about what we're going to do," Dick said when Nix had opened his eyes.

Nix groaned and threw his arm over his face. "It's too early."

"I know. I'm sorry, but I don't know how much time we have," Dick said. He stroked his thumb across Nix's belly, trying to soothe what he was about to say next. "I've been missing for two days. Men are dead. They'll be hunting for me."

"Yeah," Nix said, not uncovering his face. "Especially since it's been five days, not two."

"Oh," Dick should have expected that. He'd lost time in the fever. "You looked after me for five days?"

"Yeah," Nix said again. He sounded tired just thinking about it. Little wonder he'd passed out and slept like a log for twelve hours. "Look, I'll make breakfast, and we can talk."

Dick hadn't realised how hungry he was until that moment, but at the mention of breakfast, his stomach reminded him that he hadn't eaten in days, and needed food now.

They washed up, and Dick dressed in clothes form Ritchie's closet, which were far too loose on him. Nix had gone out for supplies a couple of times, and now made coffee, bacon, eggs and toast while Dick sat at the kitchen table and tried to get reception on the radio.

"Works better at night," Nix said as he put the plates down. "You can get Asheville then."

"Do you know if we're fugitives?" Dick asked, switching the box off. He made himself take a small bite of toast and chew it well instead of wolfing down the whole plate like he wanted to do.

"It wasn't in the paper yesterday," Nix said. "I didn't exactly want to ask around." He wasn't being careful like Dick was, and scarfed down the bacon like he hadn't seen food in days.

Dick didn't know what to do with the immeasurable weight of gratitude he felt for everything Nix had done. All he could do now was trying and get Nix as clear of this mess as he could.

"I guess we have two choices," Dick said, "I can stay on the run and hope I can hide long enough for them to forget about me."

"We," Nix interjected around a mouthful of toast.

Dick shook his head. He took a small bite of egg white and chewed. Nix had cooked it until it was rubbery. "Any proof you were there?"

"Maybe not at Forrest, but people saw me in Jacksonville asking too many questions, and I had to show my A.G.O card at the checkpoints," Nix said. "But Dick..."

Dick held up his hand, and for once Nix stilled. "The other choice is to turn myself in and explain what went wrong with the project and hope..." He couldn't actually think what to hope for there. He certainly no longer trusted the army to treat him fairly.

"Hope they don't shoot you on the spot?" Nix asked.

"Or send me back to Forrest to finish the job," Dick said. His voice was smaller than he'd meant to be. He would die before he went back there.

"Should have burned it down on the way out," Nix muttered. "What do you want to do?" he asked when Dick didn't reply to that.

Dick sighed. "I wish I could go back to Toccoa, back to Easy."

"Yeah, me too. Funny about that. I couldn't wait to get out of there before." Nix took a sip of coffee, winced when it burned his mouth, and cooled it with a generous pour from his flask. "Look, Dick, I've had a lot of time to think these last few days, and I think there's a way this could work."

* * *

Lew ended up going into town and sending a telegram to his mother, who was the one who'd gotten Lew the MP spot in Fort Ord before he'd joined the 506th, and knew more brass than Dick had even heard of. Dick didn't know what the flurry of communication that followed that involved, but not long after that, they were driving down to Charlotte.

"You okay?" Nix asked for the millionth time in three hours. They were pulling into the outskirts of town. In half an hour, they'd meet General Bill Lee of the 101st Airborne Division.

"Fine," Dick said, though he felt like throwing up. He wished he were in uniform, but at least the hat covered the worst of the baldness. 

"Yeah, you look peachy," Nix commented, but didn't slow down until he got to the nondescript civil service building where they were to meet. "Okay, here we go."

Dick nodded, still feeling sick, but got out of the jeep and squared his shoulders. He was an officer in the airborne for at least the next twenty minutes, and by God he was going to act like one. Nix came to stand beside him, looking as green as Dick felt. "You don't have to come," Dick said, also for the millionth time.

"Yeah, I do," Nix told him. "You won't remember what to say without me."

He bumped his shoulder into Dick's and they went inside.

Colonel Sink was in the conference room, and Dick had to drag his eyes away from his C.O.'s scowling face to take in General Lee, a brigadier from the Inspector General office, and a colonel without any unit insignia that Dick pegged as being in intelligence. There was no stenographer. The WAC corporal that had showed them left without a word, the door clicking shut behind her.

Dick saluted, tucking his fedora under his arm like it was a peaked cap, and standing at attention even though his legs still felt weak.

Before anyone could return the salute, or even take in the situation, Sink snarled, "Goddammit, Winters. What the ever loving fuck happened to you?"

"You can confirm this is Lieutenant Richard Winters, formerly of the 506th P.I.R.?" the other colonel asked.

"Of course I can," Sink snapped. "And that he looked a hell of a lot better when I had him."

"That will do, Colonel," Lee said, and Dick didn't know if he was talking to Sink or the other man. "At ease, Lieutenants." He paused, looked Dick and Nix up and down for a moment, then said, "Why don't you gentlemen have a seat and tell me exactly what the ever loving fuck happened to you."

Dick and Nix exchanged a glance, and then did just that. Dick wished he dared to hold Nix's hand under the table as he described what Carswell and Becker had done to him. As it was, he kept his eyes focused on the seal of the United States Army printed on the far wall and focused on speaking as concisely and accurately as he could. Up until the end of the story, that was.

The account of the final day in Fort Forrest, as Dick and Nix had worked it out, included a lot less of Nix's actions, past that he'd gone looking for Dick, met him near Jacksonville, Tennessee, and helped him escape from there. It strongly emphasised that the experiments had driven Dick into temporary insanity that had made him attack his commanding officers. Who had killed Becker was left obscure, but Dick implied that he might have, and that he'd then run raving into the woods.

"They're not making better soldiers there, sir," Dick said when he'd finished. "They're torturing men until they turn into mindless beasts."

"If you want to drop something destructive out of an airplane," Nix continued, "I hear the Air Corps has a new bomber."

"Thank you for your evaluation, Lieutenant Nixon," Lee said acidly, but his face was pale, and Dick could see him grinding his teeth in anger from six feet away. Dick didn't think most of it was directed at him.

If Dick had been the intelligence colonel, or been sitting directly next to General Lee, he would not have said a word, but the man leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. "Do you two have any corroboration on this"—he hesitated over the word—"story?"

Dick sucked in a breath, but he'd been expecting this. He wondered if the colonel had been associated with Carswell, if he was defending the army on principle, or if he just felt that thoroughness was part of his job. Dick also wondered if he would suspect every unknown officer for the rest of his career, however long that might be.

He took a breath and said as evenly as he could, "Sir, if Fort Forrest's records are intact, I believe the experimentation on myself and the other candidates was well documented. There were also pictures." And if someone had burned the place to the ground, Dick had nothing except his own body. He'd already shown Lee his sharp, curving nails, and they'd all seen his skin. If they'd been thinking, Nix could have photographed Dick when he'd rescued him.

"Sir, there's also another witness," Nix added. Dick glanced sideways at him. This was new.

"One who will testify?" the I.G. asked.

"He better," Nix muttered, then said loud enough to hear. "Yes, sir. Private Alex Bourock. He worked at Fort Forrest, and I believe he can currently be found at the YMCA in Chattanooga. I met him in Jacksonville. He said he felt responsible for what was happening."

"Oh," Dick said very softly, and felt his chest tighten and his throat close. Of all the things they'd discussed over the past few hours, this was the first to bring him close to tears. He blinked hard and returned his attention to the army seal, not Nix and the colonel debating the details.

"You met this man, Winters?" Sink asked.

Dick nodded, still not quite able to speak. He had to clear his throat before he could say, "Yes, sir. Private Bourock was a runner around the Fort. He was from Nashville, I believe, sir."

"All right, son," Sink said gently. Dick hated how a commander he'd looked up to and wanted to please now sounded like he pitied Dick. "We'll find him."

"Yes, sir."

"That will do," Lee told Nix and the colonel, and their conversation ground to a halt. "Lieutenants, Colonel Sink, will you give us the room?"

It wasn't a request, and they piled out into an anteroom across the hall, where they were keenly observed by the WAC corporal. How she could type at what sounded like sixty words a minute while still watching them, Dick didn't know. He put his hat back on, feeling self-conscious.

Ignoring Sink, Nix let out a sigh and slumped back into his chair, stretching his legs out to take up most of the office. "I never want to do that again," he muttered.

Dick sat beside him, but kept his back straight and his attention focused.

"Your hair going to grow back, Winters?" Sink asked; he sounded more curious than anything. He sat next to Dick, his posture perfect as always. The man had the army embedded in his very bones. Dick wondered if his story had shaken Sink's faith at all, or if that was even possible.

"I hope so, sir," Dick said. He rubbed his jaw and thought he felt stubble, but that could be wishful thinking. "Do you know what will happen to us, sir?"

Sink shook his head. "Above my grade, son."

Nix sat up a little. "Would you take us back in the 506th, sir?" he asked. "If you had the choice."

"Lieutenant Winters, maybe," Sink said, and when Nix slumped a little, Sink relented and said, "As far as I'm concerned, Nixon, you're due back at Camp Toccoa by 0800 day after tomorrow."

"Yes, sir," Nix said, and grinned at Dick. He looked far to smug for a man who was sitting out side a locked door while the men on the other side debated his life. Dick still felt like he wanted to vomit.

They waited for a full hour, while Dick's stomach slowly ate itself. He both wished he'd eaten before they started, and was glad he didn't have anything to throw up.

It was the intelligence colonel who came and got them, and Dick didn't know how to read his expression. Maybe he was just angry to be acting as a runner.

Dick and Nix didn't get a chance to sit down when they came in. Dick couldn't read Lee's expression either, past that he didn't look happy.

The sentence was handed down quickly, at least. Lee said, "Lieutenants, you will report back to the 506th P.I.R. in accordance with Colonel Sink's convenience."

It took every ounce of Dick's will not to look at Nix, but he held his gaze steady and asked evenly, "What about Fort Forrest, sir?"

Lee had his folded hands resting on the table in front of him, and Dick saw the knuckles turn white. He was too angry to speak.

It was the intelligence colonel who said, "Fort Forrest never existed, gentlemen. If you ever suggest otherwise, to anyone, you will find yourselves in the darkest hole in Leavenworth so fast you won't know what fell on you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," Dick and Nix said as one.

"That will be all," Lee said through gritted teeth. Whoever the colonel was, it seemed as though he had a lot more weight than a division commander behind him. If not quite enough weight to bury two junior officers in front of witnesses and walk away without looking back.

"Thank you, sir," Dick said, and got out of there as fast as they could. Sink gave them another week, and went back in, looking like he was going to say more than a few things to the other colonel.

When they got back to the jeep, Dick's footlocker was sitting in the back seat.

"Just like it never happened," Nix said once they were out of town. Bitterness choked his voice along with anger.

Dick rubbed his jaw again. He could definitely feel stubble coming in. He was going to have to shave when they got back to Asheville. "Yeah," he said.

"See how he feels if we strap him to a table and..." Nix broke off, either too angry or realising that Dick probably didn't want to hear it. "See how he feels," he muttered again, but now he sounded resigned.

"There's nothing we can do, Nix," Dick said. "We were lucky to get this deal."

"Yeah." Nix drove on in silence as rolling foothills of the Appalachians rose in front of them. Dick could see he was thinking hard, but wanted to be left to his own thoughts, and didn't try to strike up a conversation.

Would Dick be able to keep up a facade that he'd just spent almost a month on leave after a snafu about a new assignment left him in limbo? He knew that he hadn't even begun to find a whole battalion of hang ups the past few weeks had given him, but did he have any choice? He was in the army; all he could do was wash out of the Airborne and go back into regular infantry, and he didn't think that would be any better.

What he wanted to do was take Nix to bed and sleep for a thousand years. What he would do was his best to get back into fighting fitness before he went back to Toccoa. He felt stronger today already, and the weakness seemed to be fading with the illness.

Dick thought uneasily of the ease with which he'd run through the woods. The truth was—and it was a hidden guilt he'd admit only before God—Dick had wanted that strength. He would have taken if it were it offered him, to better serve his country, and for the sake of his own pride. How easy would it be for a man who didn't know the cost of those drugs to take them? How hard for the army to close down a project with so much potential? Carswell and Becker were dead, but there would be others trying to perfect what they'd gotten wrong.

"Do you think they'll really shut it down?" Nix asked out of the blue.

Dick shook his head. "I wish I knew, Lew."

"Do you think we'll ever find out?"

"I..." Dick opened his mouth and then closed it, realising that he didn't have an answer to that either. All he could do was watch for creatures running through the woods, and if he ever met one, to remember that it had once been a man.


End file.
